On Monday 24 June 2024 at 19:34 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a sports betting customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 336.0 Gbps and lasted 146 minutes. Traffic originated from 4161 autonomous systems in 74 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 336.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 146 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.662 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.078% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.44% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 12 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.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Good question. We will cover that in a follow-up post.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.