Comment Maybe not so distributed. (Score 2, Interesting) 870
This may have been a Slowloris DoS attack by some patriotic 2600 guy, not necessarily a massive coordinated multinational assault. That perl script is effective on threading web servers including Apache. I just tested it out, took down my badass 100mbps server (just the web server stalling up until the script is aborted) with a dinky server on a DSL line just by opening up a bunch of TCP sockets really really slowly, using less than 20KB/s. That's Tor friendly.
Then I installed mod_qos, tried to attack myself again, no slowdown, problem solved.
If this attack gets the right amount of attention it could turn a lot of people on (4channers mainly who are yapping up Slowlaris as their replacement for LOIC) to DoSing with this software. So for those of you using Apache, you may want to fire up mod_qos (Apache2 instructions). Actually you may want it regardless for general performance purposes.