On Tuesday 10 May 2022 at 11:01 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a crypto exchange customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 20.5 Gbps and lasted 22 minutes. Traffic originated from 298 autonomous systems in 24 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 20.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 22 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.141 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.052% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.06% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.