On Saturday 8 June 2024 at 23:11 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a airline booking customer in Southeast Asia. The attack peaked at 10.1 Gbps and lasted 110 minutes. Traffic originated from 2741 autonomous systems in 54 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 10.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 110 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.224 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.090% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.