How I found a data leak of a company during a college lecture

http://sijmen.ruwhof.net/weblog/937-how-i-found-a-huge-data-leak-of-a-company-during-a-college-lecture

by achillean • 10 years ago

142 63 10 years ago

sijmen.ruwhof.net

opaque• 10 years ago

In the words of Phineas Fisher:

"NoSQL, or rather NoAuthentication, has been a huge gift to the hacker community. Just when I was worried that they'd finally patched all of the authentication bypass bugs in MySQL, new databases came into style that lack authentication by design."

From his account of the Hacking Team Hack, worth a read if you missed it.

http://pastebin.com/raw/0SNSvyjJ

ethbro2• 10 years ago

Step 1) Bemoan how {OldSoftwarePackage} doesn't do X, Y, Z

Step 2) Write {NewSoftwarePackage} that does most of what {OldSoftwarePackage} did + X

Step 3) Spend an order of magnitude more time than expected finishing Y, which turns out to actually be rather hard because {Messy Real World Engineering Details}

Step 4) Never get to Z & eventually come up with a narrative about how Z was stupid anyway

Karunamon• 10 years ago

Heh, sounds like how software is improved. Then when the next guy who wants Z comes along...

MichaelGG• 10 years ago

Not sure what exactly you mean wrt NoAuth DBs, but having a simple on-connect password would be an improvement to all those databases.

Things like Elasticsearch not having even a basic password (esp since it's HTTP so it's trivial) is simply silly. And it's probably not a good idea to support no-auth connections at all - if it's really a hassle, just set the user/pass to the host name.

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

On the next screen I just hit the connect button to see what would happen:
Not really sure what it does, but I found several Droisys e-mail addresses in the database and decided to mail them that their database was exposed on the internet.

Oh man, this is a bad idea.

If you find something out there that you think you can connect to - poor password, no password, etc - you must be very careful.

In some cases, just reporting it will cause you problems. At this point, you probably haven't broken the law but some companies are just jackasses.

But once you connect, the game changes. It is "unauthorized access" and it's probable that you broke your local laws. At that point, it's not just a jackass company that gets involved, it's local law enforcement too.

And then you get data from the database. It's probably going to get even worse for you.

When you go a step further and share a howto on the web... this is a bad idea all around.

This is not proper disclosure. If I was him, I'd get a good lawyer.

michiel3• 10 years ago

It actually looks like the company was OK with it. The disclosure timeline shows they were responsive and addressed the problem quickly when they were made aware of its existence.

cortesoft• 10 years ago

Right, but he didn't know this when he originally connected.

sccxy3• 10 years ago

Edit: Too much info. Don't want to be google indexed.

eugenekolo2• 10 years ago

Need more details on how you got a criminal record for that. Did you settle? Did you do more than just that?

bragh2• 10 years ago

Why are you lying? You didn't get a criminal record for that: [removed link proving his lie by request]

kinai• 10 years ago

So true, no good deed goes unpunished.

13of403• 10 years ago

I've always wondered about the legality of, say, going to google and entering "not for public release filetype:pdf" then downloading (presumably accidentally shared) confidential documents from someone's server. If no authentication is required, is it fair game?

jsprogrammer9• 10 years ago

If Google has already accessed, indexed, and published it, you are in pretty good company. At the least, you have the lawyers of a multi-billion $$$ company backing you.

pmiller2• 10 years ago

That search, restricted to the past month, returns some interesting results. You can damn well bet I didn't click through.

7ewis• 10 years ago

I just did some searching, and found something similar. I cam across a Samba share for a company that has no security on it whatsoever.

I can't tell who it is specifically, without opening up any of the files, but it's either the brand, or a franchise of it.

I'm guessing I shouldn't connect to, or open anything on there due to 'unauthorized access'? But then I cannot report it either... guess it's their bad luck then?

Edit: Ok, so I found out the owner by running a whois on the IP. It's not who I initially thought it was, but after researching the company they're worth just over $3m... too worried to report it though, I've never reported any findings like this before.

bestnameever• 10 years ago

Why not forward it to the technical contact of the domain and/or ip address?

tetrep• 10 years ago

i don't see any contact info in your profile, but i'll report it for you? (not that you have any particular reason to trust me, just thought i'd offer to take the "heat")

alphapapa• 10 years ago

People are saying this guy accessed databases illegally, but what about Shodan? They crawl, port-scan, access, and index everything they can find, not just HTTP servers. They are what made it possible for this guy to find these unsecured databases in the first place. They even counted the total size of the exposed databases' records.

Why isn't Shodan being sued to pieces for illegally accessing private databases and being a "Google for black hats"? I've even found them port-scanning my home DSL connection.

0x0• 10 years ago

Wouldn't it be better and easier to do a WHOIS lookup on the actual IP address, and email whoever shows up there? Sometimes you'll get the hosting provider (and they can contact the customer for you, maybe even anonymously), and sometimes you'll find the company itself.

At least you're not bouncing around domains which can be pointed anywhere

jsumrall• 10 years ago

The database had no username and password configured to protect it, so I assumed it was a public database with data for everyone to see ;-)

No, a wink won't protect you in court. You illegally accessed someone's data. As they say: just because the house is unlocked doesn't mean you're allowed in. Pray this doesn't get you in trouble. Sjonge jonge jonge...

kba• 10 years ago

So you do everything you can to hide the IP address, but reveal that the domain is-savvy.nl resolves to it.

Either you're not actually that good at IT security or you're just making a huge brain fart.

    $ dig +short is-savvy.nl
    37.59.238.165

So it's not really a mystery what the X.X.238.165 and X.X.238.166 addresses actually refer to.

0x54MUR41• 10 years ago

For those having a trouble to access the site, this is the archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20160514214255/http://sijmen.ruw...

microcolonel• 10 years ago

I don't know why he bothered to blank out the IP address for is-savvy.nl. DNS will tell you that there is literally one A record which matches the last two bytes.

cs2818• 10 years ago

What kind of laws apply in this locality?

In the US I wouldn't be able to connect to their MongoDB server without it being a crime, password or not.

mitm2mitm• 10 years ago

A few years back I anonymously reported a huge data leak. Weeks later they asked for my name and address so they could "send me a gift".

To this day they still haven't fixed the leak. And I took a pass on that "gift".

How I found a data leak of a company during a college lecture

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