On Friday 15 July 2022 at 04:36 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a retail banking customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 43.8 Gbps and lasted 186 minutes. Traffic originated from 2440 autonomous systems in 56 countries, predominantly a rented booter service.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 43.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 186 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.529 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.010% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.26% |
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 38 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.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
This matches what we see in iGaming around big matches.