Cisco Talos Honeypot Analysis Reveals Rise in Attacks on Elasticsearch Clusters

Cisco Talos warns users that they need to keep a close eye on unsecured Elasticsearch clusters. We have recently observed a spike in attacks from multiple threat actors targeting these clusters. These attackers are targeting clusters using versions 1.4.2 and lower, and are leveraging old vulnerabilities to pass scripts to search queries and drop the attacker’s payloads. These scripts are being leveraged to drop both malware and cryptocurrency miners on victim machines. Talos has also been able to identify social media accounts associated with one of these threat actors. Because Elasticsearch is typically used to manage very large datasets, the repercussions of a successful attack on a cluster could be devastating due to the amount of data present. This post details the attack methods used by each threat actor, as well as the associated payloads.

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