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This information is dangerous :) A while back I published research on open, unauthenticated ICA (Citrix) instances that could be found by doing basic google qu
by _pdp_ 11y ago
This information is dangerous :)
A while back I published research on open, unauthenticated ICA (Citrix) instances that could be found by doing basic google queries. I was able to find a lot of interesting targets including some belonging to military and government organisations. I published my findings regarding the discovery without including any details. The blog post was very vague. Anyway, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on once you know the basics. Someone did exactly this and wrecked a few systems. I was contacted later by the effected organisations holding me directly responsible for the damage that was inflicted. I had no involvement whatsoever but the information that I provided was crucial for the discovery of these targets. This was when I realised that regardless how cool is to publish security research you should always take the necessary steps to ensure that no one is harmed.
- Twirrim 11y agoThey're entirely responsible for the damage that was inflicted. Attempting to shift the blame to you is childish at best.
- _pdp_ 11y agoMaybe, but there is such thing as responsible disclosure.
- vacri 11y agoThis is a victim-blaming myth. The prime responsibility for the damage is the person who did the damage. Not the discloser, and not the victim.
- alex_anglin 11y agoMaybe, but running unauthenticated databases on the public internet is negligent at best.
- latch 11y agoNo. It could be simple ignorance. Or an accident. In your world, what is it at worst? Criminal? Capital?
- alex_anglin 11y agoAgreed that it could be either of those things. I'm not trying to excuse criminal behavior at all, rather stating that if one puts an unauthenticated database on the internet, it's going to be compromised. For software professionals, my opinion is that to do so would be negligent.
- mentat 11y agoAn ignorance is an excuse for compromising your company or customer's data in exactly what situations? Let's just all cover our eyes and not look, then the data will be safe I'm sure.
- threatofrain 11y agoOf course it depends on the context. I don't know if it's reasonable to expect a small family clinic, therapist, or dental office to secure their client information. It seems that people just mass scan the internet looking for already known vulnerabilities. However, if it's a mid-sized business handling important information, like payment information, then I do think there ought to be a standard of dutiful behavior, because otherwise who pays for the externalities?
- vacri 11y agoIt could also be leftover testing systems that haven't been torn down yet, with nothing interesting in them. The internet is full of them.
- SamReidHughes 11y agoWhy shouldn't we blame victims too? Should we not blame victims of shark attacks that swim in shark-infested waters?
- vacri 11y agoHave another go at interpreting my comment.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- greglindahl 11y agoblekko's search engine received a lot of automated queries looking for that kind of info -- that and SEO ranking research were our top 2 types of automated search.
- achillean 11y agoI've tried to reach out for a few years now and spoke about it at every opportunity but for some reason people just aren't interested in looking at databases. Most of these MongoDB instances are running old versions and given the popularity of the project I suspect that this is a tiny fraction of deployments. Btw I'm still trying to find contacts at some organizations that are affected, but it's actually surprisingly difficult to reach somebody that is in charge of security :-/ Especially with servers hosted in the cloud doing attribution is difficult! Edit: Btw I've also tried repeatedly to get some press coverage of this issue with reporters, but nobody was interested in covering this problem.
- stevekemp 11y agoI did the same thing, spidering for open rsync shares: http://blog.steve.org.uk/secure_your_rsync_shares__please_.html http://blog.steve.org.uk/secure_your_rsync_shares__please_.h... Some scary stuff out there, freely available with minimal effort. Of course with rsync things were generally read-only, but even so lots of family financial-data, and pictures.
- nemothekid 11y agoI remember (maybe it was the same service shodan) a year ago, looking at its scanning interface and seeing my instance of my toy database listed as open. I didn't think anything of it, and was too lazy to do anything about, but I've been aware for quite some time now that people will do ip scans against common ports. This later came back to bite me in the ass when I started messing around with elasticsearch. Elasticsearch had a pretty nasty default that let you run arbitrary code from its query api and within hours my box was compromised.
- realusername 11y agoThat's exactly the reason why I'm not reporting anything anymore. The legal aspect is just really badly designed for this kind of situation. If I find something opened or unsecured by mistake, I just go somewhere else and don't report anything so this way I don't risk anything. That's sad because it's not helping anyone but I just don't want to handle any legal stuff.
- redcalx 11y agoSure, that's the legal environment we find ourselves in, and in many respects it's short sighted and counter productive, i.e. it actually fosters weak security in critical settings and the chance of those weaknesses being taken advantage of by malicious entities.
- eugeneionesco 11y ago>always take the necessary steps to ensure that no one is harmed. That is always publish anonymously.
- yeukhon 11y agoThis is known for many years so author is not the first to acknowledge that problem (just do an online search). This is a known operational problem / must-avoid / best practice for Mongo deployment.