Experts uncovered over 3.6M accessible MySQL servers worldwide

Researchers uncovered 3.6M accessible MySQL servers worldwide that represent a potential attack surface for their owners.

Researchers from Shadow Server scanned the internet for publicly accessible MySQL server instances on port 3306/TCP and uncovered 3.6M installs worldwide responding to their queries.

These publicly accessible MySQL server instances represent a potential attack surface for their owners.

“These are instances that respond to our MySQL connection request with a Server Greeting. Surprisingly to us, we found around 2.3M IPv4 addresses responding with such a greeting to our queries. Even more surprisingly, we found over 1.3M IPv6 devices responding as well (though mostly associated with a single Autonomous System).” states the report published by the researchers.

Most of the accessible IPv4 MySQL servers are in the United States (740.1K), China (296.3K), Poland (207.8K) and Germany (174.9K).

Most of the accessible IPv6 MySQL servers are in the United States (460.8K), Netherlands (296.3K), Singapore (218.2K) and Germany (173.7K).

Researchers recommend admins follow the MySQL 5.7 Secure Deployment Guide and MySQL 8.0 Secure Deployment Guide for the deployment of their servers.

“It is unlikely that you need to have your MySQL server allowing for external connections from the Internet (and thus a possible external attack surface). If you do receive a report on your network/constituency take action to filter out traffic to your MySQL instance and make sure to implement authentication on the server.” concludes the report.

The researchers shared data on the accessible MySQL instances in the Accessible MySQL Server Report.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, MySQL servers)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.