On Monday 25 September 2023 at 05:35 UTC, a memcached amplification targeted a gaming community customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 183.0 Gbps and lasted 129 minutes. Traffic originated from 1975 autonomous systems in 7 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | memcached amplification |
| Peak | 183.0 Gbps |
| Duration | 129 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.840 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.081% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.23% |
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 30 points of presence.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.