IT specialists warn about the resumption of extortion attacks aimed at misconfigured MongoDB servers.
The first wave of MongoDB attacks was observed in late 2016. Dozens of criminal groups hacked vulnerable MongoDB servers that time. After that, they also targeted ElasticSearch, Hadoop, CouchDB, Cassandra, and MySQL.
Cybercriminals used to erase all information from the databases and demanded a ransom from the owners of the servers. Importantly this was a bluff as criminals were not able to get the data back because and as stated earlier they completely delete all data during the attack.
This week extortionists stepped up again. Although the number of attackers is small compared to the cases occurred in the beginning of the year, new criminal groups involved have approached the situation on a grand scale. New attacks cause much more damage. For example, if in winter criminals managed to compromise 45,000 databases per month, now the Cru3lty group broke 22,449 databases in one week. (more…)