Editing Memcached (section)

====Used as a DDoS attack vector====
In February 2018, [[CloudFlare]] reported that misconfigured memcached servers were used to launch [[Denial-of-service attack|DDoS attacks]] in large scale.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://blog.cloudflare.com/memcrashed-major-amplification-attacks-from-port-11211/|title=Memcrashed - Major amplification attacks from UDP port 11211|date=27 Feb 2018|publisher=CloudFlare|access-date=3 March 2018}}</ref> The memcached protocol over UDP has a huge [[Denial-of-service attack#Amplification|amplification factor]], of more than 51000.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.techspot.com/news/73522-github-hit-massive-ddos-attack.html|title=GitHub falls victim to largest DDoS attack ever recorded|date=Mar 1, 2018|author=Jeffrey, Cal}}</ref> Victims of the DDoS attacks include [[GitHub]], which was flooded with 1.35&nbsp;Tbit/s peak incoming traffic.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://githubengineering.com/ddos-incident-report/|title=February 28th DDoS Incident Report|date=March 1, 2018|access-date=3 March 2018}}</ref>

This issue was mitigated in Memcached version 1.5.6, which disabled UDP protocol by default.<ref>{{cite web| url=https://github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki/ReleaseNotes156 |title=Memcached 1.5.6 Release Notes|website=[[GitHub]] |date=2018-02-27|access-date=3 March 2018}}</ref>