Honeypot study: Unsecured database simulation attacked 18x per day on average

guest · Jun 10, 2020

Honeypot study: Unsecured database simulation attacked 18x per day on average
June 10, 2020
https://www.scmagazine.com/home/sec...e-simulation-attacked-18x-per-day-on-average/

Now there’s proof that every random minute counts when a database is left unsecured on the web.
In fact, a recent Comparitech experiment led by researcher Bob Diachenko found that hackers attacked a simulation of an unsecured database an average of 18 times per day.

In a June 10 blog post, Comparitech Privacy Advocate Paul Bischoff describes typical scenarios of how unauthorized third parties discover, access and even modify exposed data without a password or other authentication, thus risking user privacy and security.
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The security firm last month set up a honeypot to find out how quickly attackers would hit an Elasticsearch cloud server containing a bogus database with fake data inside, and it subsequently found 175 attacks in eight hours after deployment. The first attack on the decoy occurred just eight hours and 35 minutes after being available for the taking.

“Within just one minute of being indexed by Shodan, two attacks took place,” Bischoff wrote.
“It’s worth nothing that over three dozen attacks occurred before the database was even indexed by search engines, demonstrating how many attackers rely on their own proactive scanning tools rather than waiting on passive IoT search engines like Shodan to crawl vulnerable databases.”
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Comparitech: Unsecured databases attacked 18 times per day by hackers

If you think leaving user data exposed online for "just a day" is no big deal, think again.
Our research team, headed by cybersecurity expert Bob Diachenko, created a simulation of a database on an Elasticsearch instance—a type of cloud server in which data is often stored—and put fake user data inside of it. Then we left it publicly exposed to see who would connect to it and how they would try to steal, scrape, or destroy the data.

The majority of requests aimed to get information about the status of the database and its settings.
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