Memcache Based DDOS Attack Heavily Targeted NRA and Highly Ranked Top Order Websites

The Memcached-Based DDOS attack heavily targeted NRA Websites and also targeting top order website such as QQ.com and 360.com.

 The National Rifle Association is America’s longest-standing civil rights organization. The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is an American nonProfit Organization that advocates for gun rights.

Apart from NRA, attack targets top order companies such as Google, Amazon, PornHub, PSN via vulnerable Memcached servers.

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Memcached-Based DDOS attack Activities

Since 2018 february, the frequency of Memcache Based DDOS Attack have increased dramatically. As shown in the following two figures:

Netlab has been roughly divided this period of time into the following stages.

• Prior to 2018-02-24, the daily average was less than 50 attacks.
• The first stage: 02-24 ~ 02-28, an average of 372 attacks per day
• Stage 2: 03-01 ~ 03-05, average daily 1938 attacks.
• 03-08, 721 attacks already took place today, with 12 more hours to go

The above figure is the number of daily active reflectors. That is, these memcache servers actually participated in real attacks and later the Memcache Based DDOS Attack vector was stabled.

Researchers conducted real test on the 15k active reflectors on Mar 07. Roughly 15% of them respond to the “stats” command we request and thus indeed have the ability to engage in actual attacks.

Github Memcache Based DDOS Attack 

GitHub DDoS attack recorded the largest yet DDoS attack that peaked at 1.35Tbps via 126.9 million packets per second. The Volumetric DDOS attack takes place between 17:21 and 17:30 UTC on February 28th.

According to netlab, they observed two Memcache Based DDOS Attack against github, . The former is the one publicly documented.

• Victim IP: 192.30.252.113
• Fired at: 2018-03-01 14:26:22 GMT +8 and 2018-03-02 01:13:44 GMT +8 respectively.
• Source Port: UDP 11211 source port
• Attack Type: udp@attack@amp_flood_target-MEMCACHE

All these technical features are consistent with github’s public documents.

The recent victims are mainly concentrated in the United States, China (including Hong Kong, China), South Korea, Brazil, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands.

There are some target IPs and their rank listed below :

Target IP                       Rank              Belongs to SLD
59.37.x.x                         09                    qq.com
36.110.x.x                       21                    360.cn
192.30.x.x                       74                    github.com
151.101.x.x                     80                    pinterest.com

IN this case with in 7 days, 10k attack events and  7131 unique victim IP addresses has been logged.