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Ongoing Meow attack has nuked >1,000 databases without telling anyone why:
More than 1,000 unsecured databases so far have been permanently deleted in an ongoing attack that leaves the word "meow" as its only calling card, according to Internet searches over the past day.
The attack first came to the attention of researcher Bob Diachenko on Tuesday, when he discovered a database that stored user details of the UFO VPN had been destroyed. UFO VPN had already been in the news that day because the world-readable database exposed a wealth of sensitive user information[...]
[...] Besides amounting to a serious privacy breach, the database was at odds with the Hong Kong-based UFO's promise to keep no logs. The VPN provider responded by moving the database to a different location but once again failed to secure it properly. Shortly after, the Meow attack wiped it out.
Since then, Meow and a similar attack have destroyed more than 1,000 other databases. At the time this post went live, the Shodan computer search site showed that 987 ElasticSearch and 70 MongoDB instances had been nuked by Meow. A separate, less-malicious attack tagged an additional 616 ElasticSearch, MongoDB, and Cassandra files with the string "university_cybersec_experiment." That attackers in this case seem to be demonstrating to the database maintainers that the files are vulnerable to being viewed or deleted.
[...] In other cases—including the current Meow attacks—the data is simply wiped out with no ransomware note or any other explanation. The only thing left behind in the current attacks in the word "meow."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Thursday July 23 2020, @10:52PM (3 children)
It is an automated attack that nukes insecure databases so they cannot be used by ransomware extortionists, thus undercutting their business model and cutting criminals off from a source of income.
Care to point out why I should not like that?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2020, @11:08PM (1 child)
Will they stop if the ransomware guys pay them enough?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Friday July 24 2020, @11:08AM
The beating will continue until morale improves.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 24 2020, @10:25PM
Its bad because it evolves them smarter.
Its trivial to set up mongo on AWS to periodically dump into S3. Then some idiot will just set up his S3 as world readable and attackers will get the whole thing not just access.
In the long run you're better off having dumb sheep being really dumb so as to work around them the easiest. Sheep that are too smart are going to be a PITA for everyone.
The bad part is unqualified people storing evil data for evil purposes, not that one evil person rips off another evil person. We're all better off with them outta business not slightly safer and in business but still evil/dumb/both.