On Sunday 20 June 2021 at 01:25 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 86.2 Gbps and lasted 150 minutes. Traffic originated from 3980 autonomous systems in 76 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 86.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 150 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.293 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.009% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.45% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 20 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?