The freight logs of two major Chinese shipping ports have been leaking
data, a problem which if left unresolved could disrupt the supply chain
of up to 70,000 tonnes of cargo a day, with potentially serious
consequences for international shipping.
The cybernews® research team identified an open ElasticSearch database,
which contained more than 243GB of data detailing current and historic ship
positions that is exposed to the public. Analyzing the data, the team
determined that it is highly likely to belong to the Yangtze river ports of
Nanjing and Zhangjiagang.
The discovery is especially timely, given the escalation of the geopolitical
situation caused by Russia’s recent decision to invade Ukraine. “This could
have gone very badly if bad guys had found it before we did,” said a
spokesperson for Cybernews.
ElasticSearch lacks a default authentication and authorization system –
meaning the data must be put behind a firewall, or else run the risk of
being freely accessed, modified or deleted by threat actors. The push access
logs of the zjgeport.com found on the database contained user IDs and, most
importantly, API keys that could in theory permit universal access, allowing
a cybercriminal to write new data about current ship positions.
ElasticSearch
缺少默认的身份验证和授权系统——这意味着数据必须放在防火墙之后，否则就有被威胁者自由访问、修改或删除的风险。在数据库中发现的
zjgeport. com 的推送访问日志包含用户 id，最重要的是，API
密钥，理论上允许通用访问，允许网络罪犯写下关于当前船只位置的新数据。
In layman’s terms, what this means is that if left unplugged, the gap could
allow threat actors to read, delete or alter any of the entries in the
exposed databases – or even create new ones for cargoes or ships that don’t
exist. Moreover, conventional criminals could physically hijack a ship and
jam its communications, leaving the port that controls and tracks its
movements unaware that the vessel had been boarded.
That in turn could jeopardize up to 3,100 vessels that transport more than
250 million tonnes of cargo annually to and from the two ports – not to
mention putting at risk the lives of the estimated 40,000 passengers a year
that use Nanjing for sea travel.
The Cybernews team said: “Because of the way ElasticSearch architecture
is built, anybody with access to the link has full administrator
privileges over the data warehouse, and is thus able to edit or delete all
of the contents and, most likely, disrupt the normal workflow of these
ports.
“Because both of these ports directly connect factories based in China to
international waters, it’s more than likely that they carry international
cargo, thus creating a butterfly effect likely to affect the whole supply
chain worldwide if the open instance is not closed.”
Zhangjiagang’s main cargoes include steel, timber, coal, cement and chemical
fertilizers, while Nanjing typically trades in goods such as metal ore,
light industrial goods, petroleum and pharmaceutical products. With Russia
having incurred global sanctions as a result of its invasion of Ukraine, the
fate of China’s economy will be more important than ever as it seeks to fill
the vacuum created by its superpower neighbor’s expulsion from the world
stage.
Since being alerted to the problem by Cybernews, the owners of the
ElasticSearch database have enforced HTTP Authentication as a requirement
for access, effectively cutting it off from the public side of the internet.
