> I'm running an elastic search for a personal project on google-cloud and I use as a search index for my application.
He very clearly says it’s a personal project. Trying to learn new topics outside of your direct responsibilities, while employed, is very common in the software industry. Not everyone that works at a company is involved in databases at that company.
I think some people in this thread want to be a bit too "absolutist" about it. Everyone's servers were exposed to heartbleed, spectre, meltdown, etc so the absolutists would apparently want the whole internet deleted.
Edit: It would be helpful if down-voter could explain (I might learn something).
Would you like it if someone involved you in adjudicating potentially illegal (under CFAA & others) without your consent?
This is clearly not a white hat hacker looking to teach people lessons about security. If it were, they could have furnished a list to the major cloud providers of broken instances and given them time to notify and remediate.
No just my Webserver/HAProxy. The difference is, don't expose services that are not meant to face the Inet directly.
Production-Type Webservers are, SSH, VPN, HAProxy etc are.
Databases, devel-webservers, NFS, Samba are not!
Sure even the best hardened Service can have vulnerabilities, but that's how life is, better have a door with a key than one without, even when someone is capable to open your door with a Lock-pick.
I did not (in the slightest) suggest that people should do this. I was commenting on the "free-ness" of the lesson (read the comment I was replying to). It could have been more "free" with a little more effort. Straight-up deletion wasn't the only option.
No but a good one.
>It could have been more "free" with a little more effort.
Even White-Hats work not for free (for companys). Don't build Cars if you don't know how a break work, don't build IT-Services if you have no the slightest idea how to secure them.
Stuff like this is what drives away underrepresented groups from engaging on the internet. Maybe everyone who upvoted and participated in the uninformed speculation from 'user5994461 should reconsider.
That kind of public ridicule and possible resulting flak from management is why more and more developers participate in knowledge exchange by asking questions from under a throwaway pseudonym (much like user5994461), and only answer or edit other questions from accounts that connect to their identity in any way.
This is not what people mean by open data
True, but a deleted database is secure again ;)
I understand that some people won't learn without encouragement but it's not a good thing for all.
Ultimately, companies like MongoDB and Elasticsearch are culpable for selling database technology that is insecure by default, presumably because that's the easiest way to boost their metrics for the VC overlords.
They could have altered the data and no one would have been the wiser
Making decisions based on a writable database (to the world, and not just from data sources like census, etc) is utterly useless.
Rather, for the first two, large numbers of agents may request access limited to a specific account, with limited capabilities granted.
Even Mediawiki, with an extraordinarily open access model (painfully so in most cases) has checks on extensive abuse, and gradations of permissions.
Suggesting that any of these are comparable to full DBA access as the Meow attack (with considerable merits0 targets suggests an exceeding poor grasp of distinctions or misreading of GP's comment.
You can do better.
> I’d much rather have my data deleted until it’s secured than have it stolen by someone else
There are multiple logical fallacies in this sentence. First is the use of the world 'until' which is ambiguous here; it suggests that your data can be 'undeleted' after the DB has been secured or you would rather not have any data stored anywhere that is not secured. Either option to me seems like an incorrect read of your comment but I'm not sure. And "than have it stolen by someone else" seems to imply that you know that this data was never copied and cannot be stolen still. I think that seems incorrect, unless there is something I missed that assures everyone that the data could not have been stolen during these hacks.
Lastly, your personally preferred outcome for your personal data is not a measure for all of society, but you grant it that "public service" label as if your preference matters above everyone else's. You don't know what other people think about their data. You don't know what the data even is. What if some of it was just a hobby project for someone, with no financial implications of unsecured data or of data loss, but with emotional attachment to their data? Do they not matter to you?
A blind deletion of unknown data belonging to unknown people is not a public service.
Consider if this happened five years ago, it would have had a smaller cost than happening today. And it was probably going to happen at some point, so better that it happened five years ago than today. By the same argument, better that it happened now than at any point in the future.
I'm not sure how serious I am about this argument but...at least a little bit? I guess the alternative argument is that any day now software vendors would have all moved to secure-by-default platforms where deploying a world-writable Redis in production would have been so difficult that it rarely happened.
A docker container can have internal ports exposed explicitly, or use host networking. In any case these are ports exposed by the docker-proxy executable - an executable like any other on the system.
Then come the iptables rules of the system (which open or not data flow to the ports exposed by docker-proxy).
Or is it different?
ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere 172.19.0.10 tcp dpt:8843
So not too concerned about partition tolerance, huh?
No, there aren't any fallacies in that sentence and can't be.
The statement expresses a personal preference; to be fallacious there must be some logic that can be unsound. That is, it must start from some premises and then derive a conclusion. To find a fallacy, you have to show that at some point the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Since it's a simple assertion, it is implicitly sound. (The graph of premises to conclusions is just a single node.) And since the author knows with certainty what his preferences are, we can take it as true. It's fruitless to argue with people about what their preferences are.
> First is the use of the world 'until' which is ambiguous here
Virtually all "fallacies" you see online are just people typing their thoughts in a hurry. Take advantage of interaction and ask them to clarify.
> Lastly, your personally preferred outcome for your personal data is not a measure for all of society, but you grant it that "public service" label as if your preference matters above everyone else's.
And as a member of the public, if it serves my interest, it is a public service to some extent.
Now, fair enough, you're trying to attack it as not being some broader notion of a public service. You have that broader notion in mind, but you don't explain what it is.
Instead you apply your internal definition through "as if..." which puts you in the territory of inventing a claim they simply never made. That's not even fallacious, it's pure fiction.
> A blind deletion of unknown data belonging to unknown people is not a public service.
You do make some claims, mostly coached as questions, that might lead to this conclusion. You never plainly state your premises, nor do you connect them to this conclusion.
So after all that, your conclusion is a non sequitur!
It is, better than to steal the data, you know what a really bad service is? Let your Database wide open, and expose your customers data (maybe?) for everyone to read.
It's a lot more work when doing it in the cloud and spinning up these things from docker containers in K8S...but you're entirely to blame if you don't know what you're deploying and don't understand any of the potential threats.
What the parent post said is pretty much it in a nutshell, but I use that GitHub for basic Ubuntu server setup.
For reference, the standard practice in a company is to have a (third) separate subnet for databases, with zero internet access (no NAT gateway). Connection must be explicitly opened from/to database clients. It's a nightmare to manage on premise but it works really well in the cloud with firewalls allowing traffic based on instance tags.
This is very good advice. We recently had a uni project where we had to use a MongoDB database. Somebody just apt-get installed a mongodb onto a DO droplet called it a day. Two days later the only remaining records prompted us to transfer x amount of BTC to a adress that was store in our DB. It just contained dummy data, but it is worrying that something like this apparently happens to lots of companies as well.
The only thing I find weird is that ElasticSearch itself does not offer a way to handle authentication, it was just enabled by a plugin that was paid (it seems like its free now).
"Wierd" is an interesting euphemism for "irresponsible." Defaults are very important. Insecure by default is insecure for 90+% of deployments.
I have a bunch of fairly important personal documents in a filing cabinet with no lock. And I'm perfectly fine with that. I wouldn't keep it in my front yard, because that's obviously stupid, but keeping it inside behind my locked door and upstairs in my office? A perfectly acceptable risk (for me and my files).
I do agree that ElasticSearch do a quite poor/irresponsible job of pointing out their cabinet has no lock. I think Redis do a better job, but are seriously let down by all the internet tutorials that just say "sudo yum install redis" as a minor intermediate step in getting example-todo-list-de-jour working - without even a footnote explaining that anybody who actually visited the redis site now has instructions on how to p0wn your box. ( http://antirez.com/news/96 ) I do think the "Securing Redis" section of this page - https://redis.io/topics/quickstart - deserves to be much closer to the top - I'd have put it before the how to download/install/start instructions myself (though I _think_ recent versions of redis only bind to localhost in the default config, maybe?)
Change them.
Cave ne recipiens donum...
The vendor / developer has both awareness and capability to ensure this.
If the default install does this, then I'd blame the package /distro maintainers. It should definitely at least only listen on localhost by default, with stern warnings what is going to happen if you change that without setting up proper security.
Most of our services were created like a POC & deployed to production, & I joined my company fairly recently.
We had a planned release this week to secure ES. And Saturday, we got "meow"ed
Just block access to it on your firewall to the public ports and require people SSH or VPN for access if needed.
It’s not
note: the DO tutorial will hold your hand a little; the hardening doc expects a (minor) degree of familiarity
I don't see anything about subnets in there though. Did I miss something?
It's not though. Subnetting and firewalling are like the foundation of any corporate network.
For real code, you wouldn't generate a web page with 5 million entries in it, so you can be pretty sure that the data is bad even if it's not cyclical (but it probably is)
If we pretend we're using readline here, ^W (yank previous word) and ^U (yank to the start of the line) should save you some key presses.
Some recommended bedtime reading:
https://catonmat.net/ftp/readline-emacs-editing-mode-cheat-s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline#Emacs_keyboard_sh...
My favorite is ^U, which 90% of the time lets you start over on a password prompt when you are sure you just fat fingered but not sure how badly.
Do you have a reference to the history of key combos like ctrl f, b, n, p and a and e? Those are typically referred to as emacs style navigation and I am genuinely unaware of history of those as common tty control codes outside of emacs for cursor movement. They weren’t dec vt control codes. Ctrl-U was though and even has ASCII assignment as “NAK”. Ctrl-H and C are similar.. but people don’t typically refer to those as “emacs” keys.
I've always heard of it as an ASCII control character and gets its history from Unix interpretations of really old IBM keyboards which got its history from typewriters. I've literally never used emacs for anything other than ^X to exit; I'd rather use cat than emacs. I use vim. But ^H has worked for me as intended on a serial console and on telnet.
Some diving through wikipedia:
[0] says: Pressing the backspace key on a computer terminal would generate the ASCII code 08, BS or Backspace, a control code which would delete the preceding character. That control code could also be accessed by pressing Control-H, as H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet.
[1] says: In some typewriters, a typist would, for example, type a lowercase letter A with acute accent (á) by typing a lowercase letter A, backspace, and then the acute accent key. This technique (also known as overstrike) is the basis for such spacing modifiers in computer character sets such as the ASCII caret (^, for the circumflex accent).
[2] says: Unix (command line and programs using readline): Ctrl+H = Delete previous character
[3] supports [0] and says: Caret notation is a notation for control characters in ASCII. The notation assigns ^A to control-code 1, sequentially through the alphabet to ^Z assigned to control-code 26 (0x1A). Often a control character can be typed on a keyboard by holding down the Ctrl and typing the character shown after the caret.
However, it's worth noting that it also says The meaning or interpretation of, or response to the individual control-codes is not prescribed by the caret notation.
But, despite that, ASCII describes control character 8 as backspace [4] [5].
According to this Wikipedia article, work on ASCII began in 1960 and its first release in 1963 [6].
Emacs' first release was in 1985 [7].
I suggest that perhaps in your bubble control sequences are referred to as emacs style navigation even if it's not necessarily the most historically accurate. I'm glad you're working with *nix enough to be familiar with emacs and there's always new old things to learn. There's a lot of history to learn and understand.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#%5EH
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%5EH
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_key#Table_of_examples
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caret_notation
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character#In_ASCII
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_control_characters#Delet...
I read your post and thought, "I've misremembered the story."
But the Wikipedia page for the Teletype-33 claims that it 1) had control characters, and 2) was inspiration for some of the ASCII character set, which was defined later in the same year:
Obviously there are variants to this, depending on what you‘re actually trying to achieve with it. My point is that a stack would be a very inefficient way to deal with loops.
2) a visited flag on an edge? That won't support simultaneous traversals. Keeping a stack is a lot more efficient than permitting only one traversal at a time.
My point still is that looking something up in a stack (did I visit this node?) costs O(n) time, so the BFS will degrade from O(m+n) to O(m*n+n).
To come back to the concurrency, if you can index your edges in some way, you can also store the visited flag in a separate datastracture to support concurrent access (one „flag store“ for each access).
Not using data structures that enable concurrency prevents performance improvements since modern hardware is, in general, more parallel than vertical.
> An interesting theory as to why the attacker used the term "meow" is because cats like to drop (or knock) items from tables.
[0] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...
FTA:
One of the first publicly known examples of a Meow attack is an Elasticsearch database belonging to a VPN provider that claimed not to keep any logs.
Secure your damned database.
The fault and responsibility lie with the deploying organisation and tools vendor. Meow is just the messenger.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63067062/elastic-search-...
Edit: The person raising that question is working for Atlassian (Jira), looks like Atlassian got their database deleted lol