What are memcached servers, and why are they being used to launch record-setting DDoS attacks? by Tom Krazit on March 6, 2018 at 11:42 am Share 17 Tweet Share Reddit Email ...

Memcached is a widely deployed open-source tool for distributed memory object caching. Attackers are taking aim at servers that have been left open and exposed to the internet, sending UDP traffic ...

If you're running memcached, you should also disable UDP support if you are not using it. If you're a developer, as Cloudflare succinctly puts it, "We've been down this road so many times.

But memcached is perfect for DDoS attacks, said Beardsley, because by default it produces many thousands of bytes of UDP (user datagram protocol) response to a very short UDP request.

Making matters worse, memcached servers support UDP, an alternative communications protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and also considered ripe for abuse in amplification attacks.

The 1Tbps-plus memcached amplification attacks that hammered GitHub and other networks over the past week can be disarmed with a "practical kill switch", according to DDoS protection firm Corero.

Memcached amplification factor can reach a massive 51,200 According to Cloudflare, Memcached-based reflection DDoS attacks can have amplification factors up to 51,200.

Running Memcached on the same machine as mod_perl works well, because our mod_perl code is CPU-heavy, whereas Memcached hardly touches the CPU. Certainly, we could buy machines dedicated to Memcached, ...

Memcached’s internal memory management, while not as sophisticated as that of Redis, is more efficient in the simplest use cases because it consumes comparatively less memory resources for metadata.

Unfortunately for .NET based sites and apps, memcached was not an option -- until recently. The current version of .NET uses an in-process cache which makes distributed caching across a web server ...