# DDoS amplifications through memcached



## SirDice (Feb 28, 2018)

Using databases/memcached is a popular method to speed up high performance websites. But apparently not everybody protects it properly and allows it to be accessible from the internet. New research discovered these open services are abused in a similar fashion to DNS and NTP amplification attacks. The memcached problem is a little bigger though, it's possible to amplify data a whopping 51000 times. DDoS creators of course love this and are massively abusing it. 

If you use memcached(1) make sure it's not reachable from the internet!

https://arstechnica.com/information...ses-use-new-way-to-achieve-unthinkable-sizes/


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## hukadan (Mar 1, 2018)

Along the same lines : GitHub survived the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded.


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## SirDice (Mar 1, 2018)

Yeah, it's quite likely recent large DDoS attacks were actually "helped" along by this issue. I mean, if you can amplify 15 bytes into 51000 bytes it's easy to see how the attacks got so large so quickly.


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