On Wednesday 7 September 2022 at 19:58 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a electronics retail customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 379.2 Gbps and lasted 104 minutes. Traffic originated from 3179 autonomous systems in 21 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 379.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 104 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.899 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.44% |
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 23 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.