Idk how proactive patching an exploited-in-the-wild unauth RCE is, but pr statements gonna pr i guess.
>This [...] vuln is not a breach or compromise of MongoDB
IANAL, but this seems like a pretty strong stance to take? Who exactly are you blaming here?
>vulnerability was discovered internally
>detected the issue
Interesting choice of words. I wonder if their SIEM/SOC discovered a compromise, or if someone detected a tweet.
>December 12–14 – We worked continuously
It took 72 clock hours, assumably hundreds of man hours, to fix a malloc use after free and cstring null term bug? Maybe the user input field length part was a major design point??
>dec 12 "detect" the issue, dec 19 cve, dec 23 first post
Boy this sure seems like a long time for a first communication for a guaranteed compromise if internet facing bug.
Not sure there's a security tool in the world that would stop data exfiltration via protocol error logs.
> IANAL, but this seems like a pretty strong stance to take? Who exactly are you blaming here?
It's a factually statement, unless you know of some information that indicates MongoDB was breached. I think you mistook "MongoDB" there to be the software instead of the company. They meant the company, their systems and infrastructure was not compromised.
> Interesting choice of words. I wonder if their SIEM/SOC discovered a compromise, or if someone detected a tweet.
I highly doubt that. it could be a crash someone noticed, a code audit, internal bug-bounty,etc.. either way I wouldn't ascribe to them deceit without proof, if it was an external source, give them the benefit of doubt that they'd have said so.
> It took 72 clock hours, assumably hundreds of man hours, to fix a malloc use after free and cstring null term bug? Maybe the user input field length part was a major design point??
You are familiar with things like SOC and SIEM, and you're confused by this? Are you familiar with Incident Response? The act of editing the code in a text editor and committing it to a branch isn't what took 72 hours.
> Boy this sure seems like a long time for a first communication for a guaranteed compromise if internet facing bug.
It does not, far from it.
> Not sure there's a security tool in the world that would stop data exfiltration via protocol error logs.
Maybe not prevent, but certainly detect and attempt to interdict/stop is certainly possible. That's what SIEMs do if they're adequately configured. But the drawback might be considerable volume of false hits. It might be better to simply reduce exposure to the internet, or remove it entirely. Just pointing out that, at least detection is possible, even with 0 days like this.
>>This [...] vuln is not a breach or compromise of MongoDB
>IANAL, but this seems like a pretty strong stance to take? Who exactly are you blaming here?
You elide the context that explains it. It's a vulnerability in their MongoDB Server product, not a result of MongoDB the company/services being compromised and secrets leaked.
> Idk how proactive patching an exploited-in-the-wild unauth RCE is, but pr statements gonna pr i guess.
Describing their response as "proactive" is about what you'd expect from a company that famously used unacknowledged writes to game benchmarks during their peak hype phase. Ironically, Mongo has been slower than PostgreSQL for years at JSON queries, the very thing at which it's supposed to excel, and especially relative to a "boring," "antiquated" relic like Postgres, which was started all the way back in 1985.
The real head-scratcher here is who is still using MongoDB, and why? It got to a point years ago where even "I told you so" types (like me) found it no longer necessary to pile on, given the wave of buyer's remorse postmortems from devs who bought into MongoDB's hype.
Might not be how it appears. The CVE number can be reserved by the org and then "published" with only minimal info, then later update with full details. Looking at the meta data that's probably what happened here (not entirely sure what the update was though):
That's a good question. I suppose that posting the commit makes it incredibly obvious how to exploit the issue, so maybe they wanted to wait a little bit longer for their on-prem users who were slow to patch?
Why? I felt the same for a while but it’s really massively improved over the years. Yes, this is a bad vuln but anyone with even. tiny bit of brain is not running mongo on the internet.. I’m using mongo very successfully at the moment in ways i could not use postgres.
To be honest, I don't think it was a stand-out 'it's better for X than Y because of Z' kind of choice for us. We are a bank, and so database options are quite limited (it's Oracle or Mongo, essentially for certain applications).
I have one application at the moment which needs to handle about 175k writes/second across AZ's. We are not sharding at the moment, but probably will once scale requires (we are getting close) -- so just one big replica-set and it's behaving .. really nicely. I tried to emulate this workload on Postgres (which is my favourite database over my entire career so far (many scars)) and we couldn't get it to where mongo was for this workload, multi-az is painful, automatic failover is still an unanswered question really, I've tried all the 'right around the corner' multi-master Postgres options and none of them did anything other than make us sad.
From the developer standpoint, it's very nice to use, I just throw documents at it and it saves them. If I want an extra field, I just add it. If I want an index on something, also just add it. No big complicated schema migrations.
Especially what helps is we have absolutely incredibly great support from MongoDB. We have a _weekly_ call with them with a bunch of their senior engineers who answer all our stupid questions and proactively look for things to improve.
Ops story is also good, we aren't using Atlas, but the on-prem kube setup while a bit clunky has enough CRDs and whatever to keep devops happy for weeks at a time.
tl;dr -- it's boring and predictable, and I rarely have to think about it which is all I ever want from a database. I'm sure we could achieve the same results with other database technologies, but the ROI on even investigating them would not be worth it, as at best I think we would end up at the same place we are at now. People seem to have deeply religious feelings on databases, but I've never really been one of them.
listen, I'm not saying the venn diagram between people who use mongo and people who would open it to the internet is a circle, but there is... ahem... a big overlap
Idk how proactive patching an exploited-in-the-wild unauth RCE is, but pr statements gonna pr i guess.
>This [...] vuln is not a breach or compromise of MongoDB
IANAL, but this seems like a pretty strong stance to take? Who exactly are you blaming here?
>vulnerability was discovered internally >detected the issue
Interesting choice of words. I wonder if their SIEM/SOC discovered a compromise, or if someone detected a tweet.
>December 12–14 – We worked continuously
It took 72 clock hours, assumably hundreds of man hours, to fix a malloc use after free and cstring null term bug? Maybe the user input field length part was a major design point??
>dec 12 "detect" the issue, dec 19 cve, dec 23 first post
Boy this sure seems like a long time for a first communication for a guaranteed compromise if internet facing bug.
Not sure there's a security tool in the world that would stop data exfiltration via protocol error logs.
It's a factually statement, unless you know of some information that indicates MongoDB was breached. I think you mistook "MongoDB" there to be the software instead of the company. They meant the company, their systems and infrastructure was not compromised.
> Interesting choice of words. I wonder if their SIEM/SOC discovered a compromise, or if someone detected a tweet.
I highly doubt that. it could be a crash someone noticed, a code audit, internal bug-bounty,etc.. either way I wouldn't ascribe to them deceit without proof, if it was an external source, give them the benefit of doubt that they'd have said so.
> It took 72 clock hours, assumably hundreds of man hours, to fix a malloc use after free and cstring null term bug? Maybe the user input field length part was a major design point??
You are familiar with things like SOC and SIEM, and you're confused by this? Are you familiar with Incident Response? The act of editing the code in a text editor and committing it to a branch isn't what took 72 hours.
> Boy this sure seems like a long time for a first communication for a guaranteed compromise if internet facing bug.
It does not, far from it.
> Not sure there's a security tool in the world that would stop data exfiltration via protocol error logs.
Maybe not prevent, but certainly detect and attempt to interdict/stop is certainly possible. That's what SIEMs do if they're adequately configured. But the drawback might be considerable volume of false hits. It might be better to simply reduce exposure to the internet, or remove it entirely. Just pointing out that, at least detection is possible, even with 0 days like this.
>IANAL, but this seems like a pretty strong stance to take? Who exactly are you blaming here?
You elide the context that explains it. It's a vulnerability in their MongoDB Server product, not a result of MongoDB the company/services being compromised and secrets leaked.
Describing their response as "proactive" is about what you'd expect from a company that famously used unacknowledged writes to game benchmarks during their peak hype phase. Ironically, Mongo has been slower than PostgreSQL for years at JSON queries, the very thing at which it's supposed to excel, and especially relative to a "boring," "antiquated" relic like Postgres, which was started all the way back in 1985.
The real head-scratcher here is who is still using MongoDB, and why? It got to a point years ago where even "I told you so" types (like me) found it no longer necessary to pile on, given the wave of buyer's remorse postmortems from devs who bought into MongoDB's hype.
I have one application at the moment which needs to handle about 175k writes/second across AZ's. We are not sharding at the moment, but probably will once scale requires (we are getting close) -- so just one big replica-set and it's behaving .. really nicely. I tried to emulate this workload on Postgres (which is my favourite database over my entire career so far (many scars)) and we couldn't get it to where mongo was for this workload, multi-az is painful, automatic failover is still an unanswered question really, I've tried all the 'right around the corner' multi-master Postgres options and none of them did anything other than make us sad.
From the developer standpoint, it's very nice to use, I just throw documents at it and it saves them. If I want an extra field, I just add it. If I want an index on something, also just add it. No big complicated schema migrations.
Especially what helps is we have absolutely incredibly great support from MongoDB. We have a _weekly_ call with them with a bunch of their senior engineers who answer all our stupid questions and proactively look for things to improve.
Ops story is also good, we aren't using Atlas, but the on-prem kube setup while a bit clunky has enough CRDs and whatever to keep devops happy for weeks at a time.
tl;dr -- it's boring and predictable, and I rarely have to think about it which is all I ever want from a database. I'm sure we could achieve the same results with other database technologies, but the ROI on even investigating them would not be worth it, as at best I think we would end up at the same place we are at now. People seem to have deeply religious feelings on databases, but I've never really been one of them.
I would not hesitate to use it on a new project.
Reference: https://bigdata.2minutestreaming.com/p/mongobleed-explained-...