A long time ago, in 2011, a rather serious vulnerability was reported in Memcached. It is now 2013, and the vulnerability still exists in the latest version on the memcached Google Code page.
The report is here: https://code.google.com/p/memcached/issues/detail?id=192
Now, as you can see, by sending a specially crafted packet, we can cause Memcached to segfault, and essentially die. Memcached is used by a lot of high profile sites to speed up page load times, and killing it would impact a bit on site performance, so I was rather curious as to why this bug had not yet been killed.
As you can see from the report, the vulnerability is trivial to exploit. Just send the magic packet of death and it kills the memcached service. I tried to get remote code execution from it, but had no luck at all. Perhaps one of you might have more luck!
memcached ded
Exploit code available to download here: killthebox.py
As always, responsible use is encouraged. Killing $(big website) memcached might get you in trouble, so don’t do it.
As for the memcached devs: You have known about this for two bloody years and never fixed it. This is terribly irresponsible of you. Fix it.
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