On Friday 20 September 2024 at 09:08 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a video streaming customer in Latin America. The attack peaked at 266.4 Gbps and lasted 62 minutes. Traffic originated from 3819 autonomous systems in 92 countries, predominantly a Mirai-derived IoT botnet.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 266.4 Gbps |
| Duration | 62 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.039 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.047% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.62% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 38 points of presence.
What the customer saw
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.