On Friday 4 June 2021 at 07:37 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a video streaming customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 65.6 Gbps and lasted 92 minutes. Traffic originated from 3002 autonomous systems in 31 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 65.6 Gbps |
| Duration | 92 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.208 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.075% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.63% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a hacktivist channel announcing the target. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 14 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
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.