On Wednesday 31 December 2025 at 11:01 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a news publisher customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 381.5 Gbps and lasted 106 minutes. Traffic originated from 650 autonomous systems in 61 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 381.5 Gbps |
| Duration | 106 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.911 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.016% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.09% |
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 20 points of presence.
What the customer saw
A brief increase in p99 latency of 210 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.