In what could be the most disturbing security trend of 2018, another new record distributed denial-of-service attack has been detected as hackers continue to exploit a technique that uses the Memcached memory caching system to amplify data volume.

The new Memcached-based DDoS attack, detected by Arbor Networks, targeted a “customer of a U.S. based Service Provider” with 1.7 terabytes of data per second. That’s 0.4 Tbps higher than the previous record high attack on GitHub reported only last Thursday.

The unnamed service provider mitigated the attack, despite its volume. Arbor Vice President Carlos Morales noted that “it’s a testament to the defense capabilities that this service provider had in place to defend against an attack of this nature that no outages were reported because of this.”

Memcached is a popular open-source distributed memory caching system that’s used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in temporary memory to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read when delivering a webpage. Those behind the attacks can exploit a setup issue with some Memcached installations, causing services running it to respond with data packets thousands of times bigger than a usual request — up to 51,000 times higher according to some reports.

What’s motivating those behind the attacks may finally be coming to light. Security firm Cybereason Inc. said in a blog post March 2 that it had found a supposed ransom note buried in the data sent as part of the GitHub DDoS attack.

Strangely, the note makes no promise to cease an attack. Instead, it simply instructs victims to pay 50 Monero, currently worth $17,900, with an address for payment. It can only be presumed that the demand for payment implies a quid pro quo of attacks ceasing in return.

Whether any organizations have paid the ransom is unknown, Cybereason noted: “Unlike bitcoin transactions, Monero transactions aren’t displayed publicly so there’s no way to see if funds have been transferred to the attacker’s Monero address.”

Image: Sagor Kumar/Wikimedia Commons