On Friday 9 May 2025 at 05:51 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a airline booking customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 296.8 Gbps and lasted 178 minutes. Traffic originated from 729 autonomous systems in 35 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 296.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 178 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.320 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.004% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.19% |
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 15 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.