On Tuesday 15 February 2022 at 17:26 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a fashion retail customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 216.7 Gbps and lasted 112 minutes. Traffic originated from 2113 autonomous systems in 97 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 216.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 112 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.863 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.068% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.37% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 18 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?