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The following facts describes devastating effect of Memcached flaw:

• A vulnerability in memcached allows attackers to amplify traffic up to 51,200 times for use in denial of service attacks.
• Only 5,729 of the 88,00 known unprotected servers have been used in memcached attacks thus far, and security experts expect an imminent increase in such attacks.    Source : TechRepublic 

Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system. One of its primary goals is to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.  This is accomplished by storing frequently accessed content in RAM, which reduces the number of database queries needed to generate a web page.  Memcached server runs over TCP or UDP port 11211.

Cybercriminals have discovered a way to abuse  memcached servers to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attacks beyond their original strength. This action could result in knocking down of major websites and Internet infrastructure.

Memcrashed amplification attack  works by sending a false request to the targeted server (vulnerable UDP server) on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim’s IP.

How to Resolve Vulnerable Memcached Servers:

• Block or implement rate-limiting UDP on source port 11211.
• Disable UDP support if not in use.

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