Thousands of etcd installs leak 750MB worth of passwords and keys

Abilene city, Texas, takes systems offline following a cyberattack Bind

Thousands of etcd installations are currently leaking 750MB worth of passwords, keys, and sensitive data.

Thousands of servers belonging to private businesses and organizations are leaking credentials and potentially sensitive data.

It is quite easy for hackers to use the credentials to access the servers and steal sensitive data or use the machines to power cyber attacks.

According to the researcher Giovanni Collazo, querying the popular Shodan search engine he found almost 2,300 servers exposed online that were running etcd, which is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines.

This kind of database is usually used to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings among various servers and applications.

etcd implements a programming interface that could be queried and that by default return administrative login credentials without authentication.

Collazo wrote a simple script that ran through the 2,284 etcd servers he found open online by querying Shodan search engine and obtained all credentials stored on the servers.

“I did a simple search on shodan and came up with 2,284 etcd servers on the open internet. So I clicked a few and on the third try I saw what I was hoping not to see. CREDENTIALS, a lot of CREDENTIALS. Credentials for things like cms_admin, mysql_root, postgres, etc.” reads the post published by Collazo.

“In order to try to get a sense of the issue I downloaded the full shodan report and wrote a very simple script that basically called the etcd API and requested all keys. That’s basically equivalent to doing a database dump but over their very nice REST API.

GET http://<ip address>:2379/v2/keys/?recursive=true

This will return all the keys stored on the servers in JSON format.”

The expert stopped the script after it collected about 750 megabytes of data from 1,485 IPs. In the following table are reported the data retrieved by the researchers:

password	8781
aws_secret_access_key	650
secret_key	23
private_key	8

Collazo did not test the credentials but it is likely that many of them work and could be used to hack into the systems.

“Anyone with just a few minutes to spare could end up with a list of hundreds of database credentials which can be used to steal data, or perform ransomware attacks.” Collazo wrote.

In order to keep etcd installs secure it is necessary to enable authentication and get them offline if not required. Another mitigation consists of setting a firewall rule to avoid unauthorized people querying etcd server.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – etcd, hacking)

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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”.