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Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

newsblur.com

41–50 of 336 posts

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately the solution is probably to begin to firewall off parts of the Internet by national boundaries. We should allow cross-country traffic where countries follow the same rules of order as we do. You can remove a lot of threats by just blocking every country you have no desire to reach people in. And if major hosting and cloud providers were restricted similarly such that foreign actors can't just rent US serve…

You’re not wrong. If you don’t have a business need to talk to some IP blocks and AS’, by all means, black hole traffic from jurisdictions who aren’t going to do diddly when someone causes you harm. I see this often with client WAF configurations depending on the endpoint use case and who is expected to be hitting that endpoint. “You’re blocking everyone outside of North America?” “Yes, we’re comfortable with that as…

Yeah, there's businesses with global markets that can't afford such a shield, but if you've got a local/physical business or you ship product only to residents of specific countries, it's basically zero cost with great upsides.

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#42
post #23

Is it too soon to ask whether their mongo instance was publicly available without password protection?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27613661

Right. Maybe someday, with enough public shaming in situations like this, mongo will reconsider those defaults.

Or not, maybe their best potential customers should continue to get burned publicly in incidents that have a direct line to their poor decisions.

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#44
post #22
post #20

NewsBlur's founder here. I'll attempt to explain what's happening. This situation is more of a script kiddie than a hacker. I'm in the process of moving everything on NewsBlur over to Docker containers in prep for the big redesign launching next week. It's been a great year of maintenance and I've enjoyed the fruits of Ansible + Docker for NewsBlur's 5 database servers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and…

This actually got me a while ago but with redis and some script kiddy turning my dev server into a bitcoin miner. Anyone else running docker and using iptables really needs to read this https://docs.docker.com/network/iptables/

The insidious thing is that there's no indication, failure, log or anything to tell you something is out of the ordinary either. It would be one thing if it just exploded and failed to run, but it's even worse that it silently interacts with iptables & ufw to allow all the traffic through. The exact opposite of what you want or intended.

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#45
post #34
post #20

NewsBlur's founder here. I'll attempt to explain what's happening. This situation is more of a script kiddie than a hacker. I'm in the process of moving everything on NewsBlur over to Docker containers in prep for the big redesign launching next week. It's been a great year of maintenance and I've enjoyed the fruits of Ansible + Docker for NewsBlur's 5 database servers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and…

In case anybody's interested, here's what the "hack" looks like: nbset:PRIMARY> show dbs READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA 0.000GB admin 0.000GB local 16.471GB newsblur 0.718GB nbset:PRIMARY> use READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA switched to db READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA nbset:PRIMARY> show collections README system.profile nbset:PRIMARY> db.README.find() { "_id" : ObjectId("60d3e112ac48d82047aab95d"), "content" : "All yo…

What happened to your service is the security equivalent of the scholar's mate. It's important to be able to lose with dignity and move on.

Your adversary was unsophisticated but this incident was your fault.

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#46
post #34
post #20

NewsBlur's founder here. I'll attempt to explain what's happening. This situation is more of a script kiddie than a hacker. I'm in the process of moving everything on NewsBlur over to Docker containers in prep for the big redesign launching next week. It's been a great year of maintenance and I've enjoyed the fruits of Ansible + Docker for NewsBlur's 5 database servers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and…

In case anybody's interested, here's what the "hack" looks like: nbset:PRIMARY> show dbs READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA 0.000GB admin 0.000GB local 16.471GB newsblur 0.718GB nbset:PRIMARY> use READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA switched to db READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA nbset:PRIMARY> show collections README system.profile nbset:PRIMARY> db.README.find() { "_id" : ObjectId("60d3e112ac48d82047aab95d"), "content" : "All yo…

> you face a heavy fine or arrest

Heavy fine yes but not arrest AFAIK. Anyway this is a script programed to scary the target.

Do you even store personal data inside that database?

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#47
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually got me a while ago but with redis and some script kiddy turning my dev server into a bitcoin miner. Anyone else running docker and using iptables really needs to read this https://docs.docker.com/network/iptables/

Almost exactly the same thing has happened to me except Selenium and they were trying to log into Playstation Network accounts.

[deleted]

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#48
post #22
post #20

NewsBlur's founder here. I'll attempt to explain what's happening. This situation is more of a script kiddie than a hacker. I'm in the process of moving everything on NewsBlur over to Docker containers in prep for the big redesign launching next week. It's been a great year of maintenance and I've enjoyed the fruits of Ansible + Docker for NewsBlur's 5 database servers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and…

This actually got me a while ago but with redis and some script kiddy turning my dev server into a bitcoin miner. Anyone else running docker and using iptables really needs to read this https://docs.docker.com/network/iptables/

Same exact thing happened to my test redis instance two years ago.

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#49
post #20

NewsBlur's founder here. I'll attempt to explain what's happening. This situation is more of a script kiddie than a hacker. I'm in the process of moving everything on NewsBlur over to Docker containers in prep for the big redesign launching next week. It's been a great year of maintenance and I've enjoyed the fruits of Ansible + Docker for NewsBlur's 5 database servers (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and…

There are search engines for services exposed to the internet, like https://www.shodan.io/ If your mongoDB server is exposed to the Internet it will show up there. When that happens, it's only a matter of time until someone targets you. You can write an alert that probes for sensitive services exposed to the Internet. In that way, if this happens again, you get an alert that you can use to detect the problem early. A…

How does shodan works like how do they know if something is exposed to the internet.

Are they scanning networks 24/7

I’m just a noob in security so therefore learning

Re: Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

#50
post #46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anybody's interested, here's what the "hack" looks like: nbset:PRIMARY> show dbs READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA 0.000GB admin 0.000GB local 16.471GB newsblur 0.718GB nbset:PRIMARY> use READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA switched to db READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA nbset:PRIMARY> show collections README system.profile nbset:PRIMARY> db.README.find() { "_id" : ObjectId("60d3e112ac48d82047aab95d"), "content" : "All yo…

> you face a heavy fine or arrest Heavy fine yes but not arrest AFAIK. Anyway this is a script programed to scary the target. Do you even store personal data inside that database?

From their Twitter feed: mongodb is just RSS feed data, personal data is in postgres and wasn’t accessible to the script kiddy
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