On Wednesday 21 August 2024 at 19:36 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a airline booking customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 220.6 Gbps and lasted 126 minutes. Traffic originated from 1980 autonomous systems in 52 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 220.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 126 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.486 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.043% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.27% |
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 27 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.