On Monday 14 July 2025 at 13:52 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a gaming community customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 276.1 Gbps and lasted 146 minutes. Traffic originated from 3120 autonomous systems in 73 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 276.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 146 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.725 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.082% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.29% |
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 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?