MongoDB database | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

At its developer conference held earlier this week in New York, the MongoDB team announced the latest version of its database management software that includes a variety of advanced features, including Field Level Encryption, Distributed Transactions, and Wildcard Indexes. The newly introduced Field Level Encryption (FLE), which will be available in the upcoming MongoDB 4.2 release, is an end-to-end encryption feature that encrypts and decrypts sensitive users' data on the client-side, preventing hackers from accessing plaintext data even if the database instance left exposed online or the server itself gets compromised. Almost every website, app, and service on the Internet today usually encrypt (particularly "hashing") only users' passwords before storing them into the databases, but unfortunately left other sensitive information unencrypted, including users' online activity data and their personal information. Moreover, even if there is an encryption...

Exclusive — A security researcher has identified an unsecured server that was leaking detailed personal details of nearly half a million Indian citizens... thanks to another MongoDB database instance that company left unprotected on the Internet accessible to anyone without password. In a report shared with The Hacker News, Bob Diachenko  disclosed that two days ago he found a 4.1 GB-sized highly sensitive database online, named " GNCTD ," containing information collected on 458,388 individuals located in Delhi, including their  Aadhaar numbers and voter ID numbers. Though it's not clear if the exposed database is linked to the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD), Diachenko found that the database contains references and email addresses with "transerve.com" domain for users registered with "senior supervisor," and "super admin" designations. Based upon the information available on  Transerve Technologies  webs...

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Cybersecurity researcher has discovered online a massive database containing records of more than 202 million Chinese citizens that remained accessible to anyone on the Internet without authentication until last week. The unprotected 854.8 gigabytes of the database was stored in an instance of MongoDB, a NoSQL high performance and cross-platform document-oriented database, hosted by an American server hosting company. In total, the database contained 202,730,434 records about job candidates from China, including candidates' personal information such as their full name, date of birth, phone number, email address, marriage status, and driver's license information, along with their professional experience and job expectations. Bob Diachenko, director of cyber risk research at Hacken.io and bug bounty platform HackenProof, discovered the existence of database two weeks ago, which had been secured shortly after his notification on Twitter. However, it is worth noting that ...

In the digital age, one of the most popular sayings is—if you're not paying, then you're not the customer, you're the product. While downloading apps on their smartphones, most users may not realize how much data they collect on you. Believe me; it's way more than you can imagine. Nowadays, many app developers are following irresponsible practices that are worth understanding, and we don't have a better example than this newly-reported incident about a virtual keyboard app. A team of security researchers at the Kromtech Security Center has discovered a massive trove of personal data belonging to more than 31 million users of the popular virtual keyboard app, AI.type, accidentally leaked online for anyone to download without requiring any password. Founded in 2010, Ai.type is a customizable and personalizable on-screen keyboard for mobile phones and tablets, with more than 40 million users worldwide. Apparently, a misconfigured MongoDB database, owned by ...

Nothing in this world is fully secure, from our borders to cyberspace. I know vulnerabilities are bad, but the worst part comes in when people just don't care to apply patches on time. Late last year, Cisco's Talos intelligence and research group discovered three critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in Memcached that exposed major websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, to hackers. Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory. The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications ( for example php-based websites) by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It's been almost eight months since the Memcached developers have released patches for three critical RCE vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-8704, CVE-2016-8705 and CVE-2016-8706) but tens of thousands of servers...

Until last year, cyber criminals were only targeting computers of individuals and organisations with ransomware and holding them for ransom, but then they started targeting unprotected online databases and servers around the globe for ransom as well. Earlier this year, we saw notorious incidents where tens of thousands of unprotected MongoDB and Elasticsearch databases were hacked and held for ransom in exchange of the data the hackers had stolen and deleted from the poorly configured systems. Now, cyber crooks have started targeting unprotected Hadoop Clusters and CouchDB servers as well, making the ransomware game nastier if your servers are not securely configured. Nearly 4,500 servers with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) — the primary distributed storage used by Hadoop applications — were found exposing more than 5,000 Terabytes (5.12 Petabytes) of data, according to an analysis conducted using Shodan search engine. This exposure is due to the same issue — H...

The ransomware attacks on poorly secured MongoDB installations have doubled in just a day. A hacker going by the handle Harak1r1 is accessing, copying and deleting unpatched or badly-configured MongoDB databases and then threatening administrators to ransom in exchange of the lost data. It all started on Monday when security researcher Victor Gevers identified nearly 200 instances of a MongoDB installation that have been erased and held for ransom , asking victims to pay hefty ransoms for the data to be restored. By Tuesday, this number reached approximately 2,000 databases as reported by Shodan Founder John Matherly, and by Friday, Gevers and fellow security researcher Niall Merrigan updated this count to 10,500. However, according to recent statistics compiled by Merrigan, the number of compromised systems have reached more than double to 27,000, over the course of about 12 hours. What's worse? Initial attacks saw ransoms of 0.2 Bitcoins (nearly US$184) to the ...

Nearly two years back, we warned users about publicly accessible MongoDB instances – almost 600 Terabytes (TB) – over the Internet which require no authentication, potentially leaving websites and servers at risk of hacking. These MongoDB instances weren't exposed due to any flaw in its software, but due to a misconfiguration (bad security practice) that let any remote attacker access MongoDB databases without using any special hacking tool. MongoDB later resolved the issue in the next version of its software by setting unrestricted remote access by default in the configuration, thousands of site administrators have not updated their servers yet. But trust me, they'll now regret this! A Hacker is now hijacking and wiping out unsecured MongoDB databases , but keeping a copy of those databases for asking administrators a ransom of 0.2 Bitcoins (nearly US$211) to return the lost data. So, admins without backups are left in a bind. In fact, the rising price of Bitcoin...

System administrators have reportedly exposed almost 600 Terabytes (TB) of MongoDB database due to running outdated and unpatched versions of the NoSQL MongoDB database. The open source MongoDB is the most popular NoSQL database used by companies of all sizes, from eBay and Sourceforge to The New York Times and LinkedIn. According to Shodan's representative John Matherly, nearly 30,000 MongoDB instances are publicly accessible over the Internet without the need of any form of authentication. This huge MongoDB database isn't exposed due to a flaw in its latest version of the software, but due to the use of out-of-date and unpatched versions of the platform that fail to bind to localhost. While investigating NoSQL databases, Matherly focused on MongoDB that is growing in popularity. "It turns out that MongoDB version 2.4.14 seems to be the last version that still listened to 0.0.0.0 [in which listening is enabled for all interfaces] by default, which ...

About two weeks back, over 40,000 organizations running MongoDB were found unprotected and vulnerable to hackers. Now, once again the users of MongoDB database are at risk because of a critical zero-day vulnerability making rounds in underground market. MongoDB , one of the leading NoSQL databases, is an open-source database used by companies of all sizes, across all industries for a wide variety of applications. By leveraging in-memory computing, MongoDB provides high performance for both reads and writes. 'PhPMoAdmin' ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY Hacker known by the online moniker, "sp1nlock" has found a zero-day vulnerability in ' phpMoAdmin ', a free, open-source, written in PHP, AJAX-based MongoDB GUI (graphical user interface) administration tool that allows you to easily manage noSQL database MongoDB. According to multiple posts available on the exploit selling underground forums, the phpMoAdmin is vulnerable to a Zero-Day Remote Code Exec...

Nearly 40,000 organisations running MongoDB , a NoSQL high performance and cross-platform document-oriented database, are found to be unprotected and vulnerable to hackers. Three students from University of Saarland in Germany at the Centre for IT Security – Kai Greshake, Eric Petryka and Jens Heyens – discovered that MongoDB databases running at TCP port 27017 as a service on several thousands of commercial web servers are easily accessible on the Internet. MongoDB is an open-source database used by companies of all sizes, across all industries for a wide variety of applications. MongoDB is built for scalability, performance and high availability, scaling from single server deployments to large, complex multi-site architectures. By leveraging in-memory computing, MongoDB provides high performance for both reads and writes. The German researchers said that they were able to get "read and write access" to the unsecured MongoDB databases without using any sp...