Cyber Crime

Other 26,000 MongoDB servers hit in a new wave of ransom attacks

Security researchers Dylan Katz and Victor Gevers confirmed other 26,000 MongoDB servers were hit in a new wave of ransom attacks.

Ransom attacks on MongoDB databases revamped over the weekend after an apparent pause. According to the security researchers Dylan Katz and Victor Gevers, three new groups appeared on the threat landscape and hijacked over 26,000 servers, one of them, in particular, is responsible for hijacking 22,000 machines.

Email address Victims Ransom demand Bitcoin address
cru3lty@safe-mail.net 22,449 0.2 BTC Bitcoin address
wolsec@secmail.pro 3,516 0.05 BTC Bitcoin address
mongodb@tfwno.gf 839 0.15 BTC Bitcoin address

The security duo believes the attacks are the continuation of the wave of Ransom attack in MongoDB called MongoDB Apocalypse that peaked in January 2017.

The attacks were discovered by the Co-founder of the GDI Foundation, Victor Gevers, who warned of poor security for MongoDB installations in the wild. The security expert discovered in January 196 instances of MongoDB that were wiped by Harak1r1 and being held for ransom.

Multiple hacking groups scanned the internet for MongoDB installs left open for external connections and replaced their content with a ransom demand.

The analysis of the Bitcoin wallet used by Harak1r1 revealed that at least 22 victims appeared to have paid.

Many experts in the security community contributed in tracking the attacks, over 45,000 installs were compromised. Hackers targeted also other DBMS, such as MySQLElasticSearchHadoop, Cassandra, and CouchDB.

Back to the present, new groups launched a new wave of attacks against MongoDB databases. Compared with MongoDB Apocalypse, the number of compromised databases in decreased respect the first wave of attacks.

Gevers told Bleeping Computer that even if there are fewer attackers, the impact is larger.

The experts are now investigating the cause of the success of the attacks.

 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – MongoDB databases, Ransom attacks)

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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”.

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