Image: Daan Mooij

Financial data, personally identifiable information (PII), and real-time location of millions of Chinese users was leaked by an open Elastic cluster hosted on infrastructure owned by Aliyun Computing Co (also known as Alibaba Cloud).

The highly sensitive information was added to the publicly-accessible database by over 100 mobile loan-related apps used by Chinese people when applying for loans.

According to Safety Detectives’ Head of Research Anurag Sen, the researcher who initially discovered the data leak, the company who owns the ElasticSearch server is not known even though the leaky database is now unreachable after Alibaba took down the exposed server.

However, as per the researchers’ opinion, the leaked data appears to be owned by a Chinese mobile app marketing agency who was storing the huge trove of info on a rented server.

Before being secured, the publicly accessible database left data on more than 4.6 million mobile devices out in the open for roughly two weeks, between the time the ElasticSearch cluster was discovered by Sen and the moment it was taken offline by Alibaba, the hosting provider.

As discovered by the researcher, the open database leaked 899 Gb of identity, credit card, banking, device, and real-time GPS location information, as well as loan records and transaction details, risk management data, mobile billing invoices, list of installed apps, app tracking data.

To make things even worse, some of the millions of leaked records also contained the users’ passwords encrypted using the decodable MD5 message-digest algorithm.

“There are more than enough details to entirely overtake someone’s identity without any significant effort whatsoever,” says the report. “If this data were to be sold on the Dark Web, it could easily be packaged into a ‘deal’ where an individual’s financial, medical, and personal life are up for grabs.”

How to secure ElasticSearch clusters

Although Elastic Stack’s core security features are now free according to an announcement made by Elastic NV during May, publicly-accessible unsecured ElasticSearch clusters are constantly being discovered by security researchers.

“This means that users can now encrypt network traffic, create and manage users, define roles that protect index and cluster level access, and fully secure Kibana with Spaces” as per ElasticSearch’s developers.

Elastisearch servers should ​​​​only be accessible by users on the company’s local network to make sure that only the database’s owners can access them as ElasticSearch’s development team also detailed back in December 2013.

Elastic NV also advises database admins to secure the ElasticSearch stack by “encrypting communications, role-based access control, IP filtering, and auditing,” to properly configure the cluster before to deploying it, as well as to configure passwords for their servers’ built-in users.

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