On Sunday 23 October 2022 at 04:06 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a developer platform customer in North America. The attack peaked at 40.2 Gbps and lasted 100 minutes. Traffic originated from 2645 autonomous systems in 56 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 40.2 Gbps |
| Duration | 100 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.677 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.083% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.39% |
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 20 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.