On Thursday 1 January 2026 at 21:45 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a online casino customer in the Nordics. The attack peaked at 283.3 Gbps and lasted 34 minutes. Traffic originated from 200 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 283.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 34 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.689 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.060% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.49% |
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 28 points of presence.
What the customer saw
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.