On Wednesday 15 October 2025 at 16:33 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a developer platform customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 130.0 Gbps and lasted 103 minutes. Traffic originated from 819 autonomous systems in 20 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 130.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 103 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.615 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.049% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.31% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 23 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
Clear and practical, thanks.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Machine-readable ranges are at /ips.json and via the API.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.