Unprotected MongoDB instances remain an easy target for financially motivated hackers, with over 1,400 servers currently showing signs of compromise, threat management firm Flare reports.
Ransacking MongoDB databases was a trend roughly a decade ago, with over 33,000 instances hijacked in a massive campaign detailed in early 2017.
Because database owners failed to properly protect internet-accessible MongoDB instances, hackers accessed them, wiped their content, and dropped ransom notes demanding payment in exchange for the erased content.
Now, Flare says that there are over 200,000 MongoDB servers publicly discoverable, with more than 100,000 disclosing operational information.
Alarmingly, 3,100 databases are exposed to the internet without proper restrictions, allowing anyone to access them.
Of these, 1,416 instances (45.6%) have been compromised, with their contents replaced with ransom notes typically demanding a $500 ransom payment in Bitcoin, Flare says.
In 98% of these cases, the ransom notes mention the same bitcoin address, strongly suggesting that the MongoDB ransacking was performed by the same threat actor.
The remaining 1,684 servers (54.4%) do not show signs of infection, and Flare believes that at least some of their owners might have paid a ransom,
“This suggests that the threat actor’s earnings from this campaign could range from $0 USD (assuming all remaining servers were test environments that were simply taken offline) to as much as $842,000,” Flare notes.
At the moment, the threat actor’s Bitcoin wallet appears to have received only around $400, suggesting that the ransacking activity might not have been as profitable for the hacker.
Flare’s investigation also revealed that over 95,000 of the identified servers (46.3%) had at least one vulnerability. Most of the flaws could lead to denial-of-service (DoS) conditions.
“In our case, the only truly problematic assets are the approximately 3,100 MongoDB instances that were exposed without proper access controls,” Flare notes.
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