alt Hacker NewsHow often are mongo instances exposed to the internet? I'm more of an SQL person and for those I know it's pretty uncommon, but does happen.
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A highly cited reason for using mongo is that people would rather not figure out a schema. (N=3/3 for “serious” orgs I know using mongo).
That sort of inclination to push off doing the right thing now to save yourself a headache down the line probably overlaps with “let’s just make the db publicly exposed” instead of doing the work of setting up an internal network to save yourself a headache down the line.
Are you guys serious with these takes?
You very often have both NoSQL and SQL at scale.
NoSQL is used for high availability of data at scale - iMessage famously uses it for message threads, EA famously uses it for gaming matchmaking.
What you do is have both SQL and NoSQL. The NoSQL is basically caches of resources for high availability. Imagine you are making a social media app... Yes of course you have a SQL database that stores all the data, but you maintain API caches of posts in NoSQL.
Why? This gets to some of your other black vs white insults: NoSQL is typically WAY FASTER than SQL. That's why you use it. It's way faster to read a JSON file from a hard drive than it is to query a SQL database, always has been. So why not use NoSQL for EVERYTHING? Well, because you have duplicated data everywhere since it's not relational, it's just giant caches essentially. You also will get slow queries when the documents get huge.
Anyway you need both. It's not an either/or thing. I cannot believe this many years later people do not know the purpose of SQL and NoSQL and do not understand that it is not a competition at all. You want both!
The article links to a shodan scan reporting 213K exposed instances https://www.shodan.io/search?query=Product%3A%22MongoDB%22
My university has one exposed to the internet, and it's still not patched. Everyone is on holiday and I have no idea who to contact.
It could be because when you leave an SQL server exposed it often turns into much worse things. For example, without additional configuration, PostgreSQL will default into a configuration that can own the entire host machine. There is probably some obscure feature that allows system process management, uploading a shell script or something else that isn't disabled by default.
The end result is "everyone" kind of knows that if you put a PostgreSQL instance up publicly facing without a password or with a weak/default password, it will be popped in minutes and you'll find out about it because the attackers are lazy and just running crypto-mine malware, etc.
For a long time, the default install had it binding to all interfaces and with authentication disabled.
often. lots of data leaks happened because of this. people spin it up in a cloud vm and forget it has a public ip all the time.
From my experience, Mongo DB's entire raison d'etre is "laziness".
* Don't worry about a schema.
* Don't worry about persistence or durability.
* Don't worry about reads or writes.
* Don't worry about connectivity.
This is basically the entire philosophy, so it's not surprising at all that users would also not worry about basic security.