On Wednesday 27 April 2022 at 17:10 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a education platform customer in Central Europe. The attack peaked at 370.1 Gbps and lasted 63 minutes. Traffic originated from 3469 autonomous systems in 38 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 370.1 Gbps |
| Duration | 63 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.195 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.036% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.26% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by no stated motive. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 32 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 log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
Any plans to support per-tenant limits keyed on a JWT claim?
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.