On Wednesday 6 September 2023 at 14:24 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a education platform customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 290.8 Gbps and lasted 87 minutes. Traffic originated from 3895 autonomous systems in 82 countries, predominantly hijacked home routers.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 290.8 Gbps |
| Duration | 87 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.519 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.086% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.67% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a ransom note demanding payment in Monero. Edge packet filters identified the flood by source port and payload signature and dropped it at line rate across 12 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.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Solid runbook advice. The DNS-at-2am point hit home.
Clear and practical, thanks.
Interesting that most attacks are under ten minutes. Our experience is similar.
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?
Clear and practical, thanks.
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Could you share the dataset behind the percentages?
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
Is the risk score exposed in the logs so we can build our own dashboards on it?