On Wednesday 2 March 2022 at 12:44 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a electronics retail customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 23.3 Gbps and lasted 148 minutes. Traffic originated from 2218 autonomous systems in 6 countries, predominantly compromised cloud VMs.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 23.3 Gbps |
| Duration | 148 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.602 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.025% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.53% |
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 27 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 authenticated origin pulls.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
How does the proof-of-work challenge behave on older Android devices? Any numbers below Android 10?