On Tuesday 25 February 2025 at 12:42 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a gaming community customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 65.3 Gbps and lasted 179 minutes. Traffic originated from 258 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 65.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 179 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.313 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.024% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.48% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 25 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.