If you’ve never heard of Elasticsearch, you can certainly be excused. Here at 4GoodHosting we’ve got some pretty smart cookies around, but as a whole we’re a Canadian web hosting provider who’ll never claim to be entirely full of digital wherewithal. Truth be told I hadn’t heard of it either until recently, but no one had ever suggested to me that I should give a second thought to whether or not I’ll trust it as base for searching online. Right then, get right to the definition you say. Elasticsearch is an open source search and analytics engine and data store developed by Elastic. The appeal of it has always been in the way it allows for searching through huge amounts of data with reasonable timeframes, and running calculations with resultant data in the blink of an eye. However, recent news indicates that there’s a potential downside to using Elasticsearch, and sharing what we know about that is going to be the subject of this week’s entry here. Legit Associations Elasticsearch has been all over the headlines – well, industry headlines at least – recently, and not in a good way. It seems like each new week brings along a new story about a breached Elasticsearch server resulting in troves of data being exposed. But why is this happening with Elasticsearch buckets as predominantly as it has been, and is it legit to associate Elasticsearch with an ever-present risk of this happening? The question then further becomes can businesses leveraging this otherwise very-helpful technology do so to the full extent while still avoid data leaks? Organizations have been using this platform en masse to store information in depositories (aka ‘buckets’), the contents of which then become emails, spreadsheets, social media posts, files and any and all matter of raw data in the form of text, numbers, or geospatial data. The problem for Elastic is that now it’s beyond debate that their storage option is leaving massive amounts of date unprotected and potentially exposed online. Sometimes this leak is disastrous, and the number of high-profile breaches attributed to use of Elasticsearch continues to grow. nvenient as this sounds, it can be disastrous...
