26k+ Kibana Instances exposed Elasticsearch databases online

Security expert discovered thousands of unsafe Kibana instances that are exposed online, the news was first reported by colleagues at THN.

Kibana is an open source data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch. It provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed on an Elasticsearch cluster. Users can create bar, line and scatter plots, or pie charts and maps on top of large volumes of data.

A default Kibana installation runs on localhost at port 5601, but many installs allows administrators to remotely accessible them.

A researcher that goes online with the Twitter handle @InfoSecIta has discovered over 26,000 Kibana installs exposed on the Internet, most of them in the US and China. Most of the exposed Kibana instances are hosted on cloud services from Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

The experts used the popular Shodan search engine to find the Kibana instances, and unfortunately, many of them appear to be unprotected.

“About the real issue there: Even if your server is super secured and well configured, and your Elasticsearch is bound to 127.0.0.1 or localhost, or whatever kind of loopback address, an unprotected Kibana app running on top of the elasticsearch stack can compromise your server operativity and allow unauthenticated users to access Kibana dashboard (with admin privileges), thus gifting a strong foothold in further privilege escalation attacks to malicious entities,” reads a post published by InfoSecIta on mediumexplains.

According to The Hacker News, unprotected Kibana installs belong to large enterprises, including banks, and parking management to hospitals and universities. One of the Kibana installs belong to a major firm in building automotive technology, the instance was exposing all the data coming from every camera they sold worldwide.

“Every kind of data coming from the logs/debug/status of such camera were available. I also found a Kibana stack from a big Asian stock exchange, which is still available unprotected in the wild.” the expert told THN.

The expert pointed out that most of the exposed instances are running outdated versions of the software that is known to be volberable to an arbitrary file inclusion vulnerability in its Console plugin.

The flaw could be potentially exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the host server.

Organizations running Kibana installs have to secure them with a string password and of course, they have to check they are running last versions of the software.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Kibana, 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”.