Check your Amazon EC2 security groups for inbound rules that allow unrestricted access (i.e. 0.0.0.0/0 or ::/0) on TCP and/or UDP port 11211 in order to reduce the attack surface and protect the Memcached cache server instances associated with your security groups. Memcached is an open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, intended for use in speeding up dynamic websites and web applications by alleviating database load.
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Allowing unrestricted inbound/ingress access on TCP and/or UDP port 11211 (Memcached) to your Amazon EC2 instances can increase opportunities for malicious activities such as DDoS amplification attacks, which can have a serious impact on the health and stability of your web services and applications.
Audit
To determine if your Amazon EC2 security groups allow unrestricted Memcached access, perform the following actions:
Remediation / Resolution
To update your Amazon EC2 security groups configuration in order to restrict Memcached access to trusted entities such as authorized IP addresses, IP address ranges, and security groups, perform the following actions:
References
- AWS Documentation
- Amazon EC2 security groups for Linux instances
- Working with security groups
- Security group rules reference
- Authorizing inbound traffic for your Linux instances
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) Documentation
- ec2
- describe-security-groups
- revoke-security-group-ingress
- authorize-security-group-ingress
- Memcached Documentation
- Memcached
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You are auditing:
Check for Unrestricted Memcached Access
Risk level: Very High