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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: 2) by Thexalon on Friday July 24 2020, @03:20AM (4 children)
So you've just changed which line-item in the vast classified budget of the organizations running the government database gets slightly more money? That doesn't help, say, an agent using the data illegally to track down their ex.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 24 2020, @05:15AM
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday July 24 2020, @06:34PM (1 child)
Costs is not about money at all.
Storage, backup, seek, even just a mark as irrelevant and dismissal, every operation with particular information consumes real resources.
As real, as energy, time, space, material and real people is real.
While you can throw an inductively infinite amount of artificially created money on any government project, you never have an infinite amount of real resources.
A curse of growth. Ask
CIAGoogle why they had to bury a G+.That's the meaning of costs I had on my mind.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @08:41PM
Taxpayers will cover that.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:44AM
Oh, I don't know :) Done correctly, hard enough, and randomly enough that it can't be algorithm'd around, Bayesian Poisoning (the proper name for this sort of thing) could be very effective indeed. If the Alphabet Soup Brigade wants to slurp our data, by all means, crank that firehose on full force until they explode.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...