On Sunday 8 January 2023 at 13:14 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a electronics retail customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 343.8 Gbps and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 817 autonomous systems in 11 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 343.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 133 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.199 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.053% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.56% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 32 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.