On Sunday 17 July 2022 at 22:02 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a education platform customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 259.1 Gbps and lasted 174 minutes. Traffic originated from 3890 autonomous systems in 111 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 259.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 174 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.412 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.083% |
| 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 40 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.