On Tuesday 20 December 2022 at 12:56 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a education platform customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 189.7 Gbps and lasted 139 minutes. Traffic originated from 166 autonomous systems in 39 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 189.7 Gbps |
| Duration | 139 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.683 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
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 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
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.