Memcached DDoS: The Biggest, Baddest Denial of Service Attacker Yet

We’ve been seeing a rise of ever bigger Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks for years now. But, now a new attack method, Memcrashed, can blast your site with over a terabyte of traffic. Good luck standing up to that volume of abuse!

Memcrashed works by exploiting the memcached program. Memcached is an open-source, high-performance, distributed, object-caching system. It’s commonly used by social networks such as Facebook and its creator LiveJournalas an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data. It’s the program that enables them to handle their massive data I/O. It’s also used by many to cache their web-server-session data to speed up their sites — and that’s where the trouble starts.

Read more at ZDNet