What is Elasticsearch and why is it involved in so many data leaks?

What is Elasticsearch and why is it involved in so many data leaks?

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Introduction

Elasticsearch is one of the popular topics in today’s news, as every week it is discussed through the latest story of an elastic search server that has been a breach. It helps display the information, but it leads to many violations from its bucket. First, we need to get the complete idea about Elasticsearch. It is an open-source analytics engine and a developed data store. With the help of Elasticsearch, companies gain the ability to search for a large amount of data and calculations running within seconds. It is cloud-based and available for local use. We can use it with other cloud offerings and use it as a platform for data storage in depositories, including files, social media posts, spreadsheets, and emails. However Elasticsearch training provides good knowledge in the subject and we have covered all the important points related to Elasticsearch.Let’s go through them.

What is Elasticsearch

It is an open and accessible search engine used for all kinds of information, and they contain various types of data like textual, geospatial, numerical, structured, and unstructured. It takes data from multiple sources like web applications, system matrix, and logs. Then that raw data is indexed in Elasticsearch after normalization and enrichment through the process of data ingestion. This Elasticsearch indexing helps users run data queries and utilize the aggregations for data summaries retribution. Through kibana, customers can design compelling visualizations with their data, dashboards sharing, elastic stack management, etc. Elasticsearch provides logstash, which is used for data process and aggregation to send it to Elasticsearch. This data process pipeline is server-side-based, allowing us to ingest information from different sources and send it to Elasticsearch for indexing; its maps help for geospatial data visualization.

Why elastic search

It maintains high speed as it creates on the top of Lucene, and it is proficient at full data search. It is a real-time platform for searching, and it suits sensitive cases like monitoring of infrastructure and analytics of security. It is distributive, and the stored data distributes to various containers, namely shards, which offer redundant data copies when hardware fails. Elasticsearch permits us to scale out to many servers and maintain the data petabytes, and it supports a large set of features extra to its resiliency, scalability, and speed. Its built-in features are used for effective data searching and storing, like rollups of data and life cycle management. It simplifies various processes like visualization, reporting, data ingestion, etc. Its beat integration made the data process as simple as before Elasticsearch indexing. Elasticsearch is free of cost, and we can use it either through SSPL or elastic license.

why Elasticsearch is involved in so many data leaks

There are situations where Elasticsearch continuously leaks the personal information of many companies and people; we need to maintain the security measures for Elasticsearch filters. As per reports, there are complaints from security professionals that because of no proper built-in protection, breaches are appearing when there is no particular firewalls and proper password maintainance. The Elasticsearch offers suggestions for their server security, including the secured sign-in authentication, the same encryption, layered security, and logging audits. There are many incidents like in 2020, and there is a massive leakage of millions of records on the dashboard of elastic search from cosmetic giant Avon. 

the same problem repeats with sports giant, decathlon, where 123 million files leak, and after because of the unprotected database, nearly five billion files leak. And another case is with a misconfigured bucket containing the family tree maker and the service of online genealogy face the leakage of 25 GB personal data leakage. It is essential to know that about Elasticsearch. It is not safe to neglect security and configurations’ fundamental recommendations, as it is available for free and highly scalable. For most companies, the privacy and security of data play a crucial role in profit. The monetizing popularity used to update the information has never been better. It solves the problems with the data breaches of Elasticsearch efficiently. Various security methods are essential, which allow the information to be safe where it existed.

Advantages of Elasticsearch

The given below are some essential advantages of Elasticsearch.

  • Many search options: it maintains various features for searching like customized data splitting into words, stemming, the search of faceted, full-text search, instant search, and autocompletion. We can identify the spelling mistakes while typing. It simply refers to the existing tags and tries to describe the search according to search history.
  • Document orientation: it keeps the complex entities of the real-world as indexes and JSOD documents. It uses all fields through default along with high-performance results.
  • Speed: performance speaking, it is capable of complex query execution with high speed. It caches the queries generally used as filters of the result set. Every request includes a filter of cached as it checks the cache results.
  • Scalability: it develops the Elasticsearch teams as it is exposed through nature and can scale horizontally. It offers the capabilities of resource extinctions to balance loads of cluster nodes. 
  • Data records: it records the changes in log transactions in various cluster nodes to minimize data loss.
  • Query fine-tuning: it has an effective DSL based on JSON, which permits the teams of developers to construct complex queries. And prepare them for result receiving of precise search offers the ranking way and effects of grouping.

Conclusion

Nowadays, everything is changing with high speed, and it is essential to use the latest trends by understanding them. It can gain the speed response for search, as we have the facility of index searching instead of searching the text directly. It is like searching with important words through index scanning, and it can scale many servers and accommodated data petabytes. Elastisearch provides various ways to increase the searching abilities with the help of query DSL and APIs. Instead of searching the full text typically, it maintains the clients as available, which helps us use Elasticsearch with various programming languages like PHP, Javascript, Ruby, and others. It supports multiple use cases such as full-text search, storage of analytics, spells checker, alerting engine, and documents storage.