On Friday 8 March 2024 at 07:53 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a video streaming customer in North America. The attack peaked at 57.6 Gbps and lasted 181 minutes. Traffic originated from 324 autonomous systems in 20 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 57.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 181 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.207 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.062% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.03% |
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 37 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?