On Monday 7 November 2022 at 11:03 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a education platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 244.6 Gbps and lasted 176 minutes. Traffic originated from 4177 autonomous systems in 19 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 244.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 176 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.719 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.011% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.36% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 17 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
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.