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Big Data and Security: Misconfigured Data Repos Leave Terabytes of Data Unsecured
Everyone is scrambling to jump aboard the Big Data bandwagon. Big Data, data analytics, No-SQL databases are just a few of the technology tools that are popping up for managing, massaging, and measuring just about any kind of data you might have. The problem is that as people jump in to try out these new technologies, security is often not high on their list of priorities, and that leads to problem.
The biggest problem is that tools aren’t being configured to be secure. It’s not that the software doesn’t provide security capabilities. More often than not the problem is that people are simply ignoring security; people aren’t using the levers and switches already available for tightening security. It’s more that security is just being ignored.
BinaryEdge did an experiment where they starting searching the internet for instances of the following four technologies that were not securely configured:
Their study found 46,000 MongoDB servers holding more than 600 terabytes of information that had no protection. Another 35,000 instances of the Redis key-value cache and store technology holding upwards of 13 terabytes of data had no authentication. And 9000 instances of ElasticSearch exposed 531 terabytes of data.
Jason du Preez, chief executive of Privita, told SC Magazine UK, that “with easy, cheap access to significant computing power, its really not that hard to find valuable or sensitive information in what might have historically seemed like enormous amounts of data… With these new, open-source software tools, powered by unprecedented access to cloud computing, it is clear that we need new approaches to protecting sensitive data sets. There’s no excuse for poor perimeter security and best practice should be followed here – but organizations should also be taking a privacy-by-default approach to data management. This is best designed in to architectures from the outset.”
