Edit: The attacker didn't need nearly that kind of bandwidth to execute this attack. See [1]
Edit: 1/50th -> 1/400th (bits vs bytes)
[0] http://www.internetlivestats.com/one-second/#traffic-band
> The vulnerability via misconfiguration described in the post is somewhat unique amongst that class of attacks because the amplification factor is up to 51,000, meaning that for each byte sent by the attacker, up to 51KB is sent toward the target.
Rhetorical of course. Akamai should have logs of their offenders. Off to scan for offenders and notify their providers!
If I install a service on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora it is disabled by default, if I start the service firewalld will block traffic until I have explicitly enabled a rule to allow it (or explicitly stopped and disabled the firewalld service).
Does this prevent people from making poor decisions, like just blindly starting the service without reading the configuration file, or disabling firewalld/enabling a rule without checking the configuration first? No, it doesn't - but that small hurdle at least prevents people from inadvertently turning on a service and opening it up to the world just by installing a package.
This is of course the wrong way to do it -- you need to filter inbound UDP to your memcached instances so you don't waste your resources generating the responses, and also so you don't accidentally fragment the responses and only drop the first fragment outbound.
Yes, the server or instance customer should be doing this. But they’re not, because poor security practices are an externality, not a cost they sustain.
Security is more important than developer velocity, but users pay the bills.
It’s an ISPs job to filter outbound udp on arbitrary ports? Shall we only let 443 tcp outbound from eyeball networks?
The problem is the ISPs allowing spoofed IPs.
So the attacker only needs to find somewhere on the internet that is capable of generating spoofed packets. They needed a lot of places that had a reflection server, but the requirements for the spoofing was much smaller.
In other words, you would have to prevent 99.9% of the internet from being able to spoof source addresses before you fixed this problem.
> The memcache protocol was never meant to be exposed to the Internet, but there are currently more than 50,000 known vulnerable systems exposed at the time of this writing. By default, memcached listens on localhost on TCP and UDP port 11211 on most versions of Linux, but in some distributions it is configured to listen to this port on all interfaces by default.
Yikes!
That is incorrect.
The attackers made requests that were forged to have the sender IP address of Github to multiple public memcached instances. Memcached then responds back to Github instead of the attacker.
This is documented in more detail in the Cloudflare vulnerability report[0]
https://blog.cloudflare.com/memcrashed-major-amplification-a...
From what I understand the attack originates from publicly exposed memcached servers configured to support udp and that have no authentication requirements:
- put a large object in a key
- construct a memcached "get" request for that key
- forge the IP address of the udp request to point to that of the target/victim server
- memcached sends the large object to the target/victim
Multiply times thousands of exposed memcached servers.
That about right?
I consider it community service.