On Thursday 23 January 2025 at 21:02 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a municipal services customer in North America. The attack peaked at 87.3 Gbps and lasted 177 minutes. Traffic originated from 1600 autonomous systems in 70 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 87.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 177 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.347 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.003% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.80% |
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 28 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.