On Friday 10 April 2026 at 20:56 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a sports betting customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 199.9 Gbps and lasted 142 minutes. Traffic originated from 758 autonomous systems in 118 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 199.9 Gbps |
| Duration | 142 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.829 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.058% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.48% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 40 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
We had the exact false-positive issue with CGNAT carriers. The weighting change makes sense.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Would love a follow-up on how you handle HTTP/3 fingerprinting.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.