On Sunday 14 August 2022 at 11:08 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a healthcare portal customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 163.8 Gbps and lasted 124 minutes. Traffic originated from 522 autonomous systems in 47 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 163.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 124 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.502 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
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 29 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.