Cn Gaohe Itgaohe 2026 05 17

Nicholas Michael Kloster / NuClide Research nicholas@nuclide-research.com

2026-05-17

Re: Unauthenticated Elasticsearch with AI/RAG workload, Gaohe IT (itgaohe.com) IP / Host: 120.27.113.59 (cluster docker-cluster (1f42c439c34e)) Severity: HIGH

I’m an independent security researcher conducting good-faith AI infrastructure research under the NuClide Research umbrella (CISA disclosures CVE-2025-4364, ICSA-25-140-11). This is an unsolicited coordinated disclosure. No engagement exists with your organization. I have not read, modified, or exfiltrated documents. Only index metadata (schema, counts, sizes) needed to identify the exposure.

Summary

The Elasticsearch endpoint at http://120.27.113.59:9200 is reachable from the public internet with no authentication. The cluster carries one or more AI / RAG workloads (dense_vector or knn_vector fields). TLS SAN includes itgaohe.com.

State (verified 2026-05-17): MID-WIPE: extortion marker planted, AI data still alive

Infrastructure

Alive on the cluster

Extortion marker

An index named read_me is present on the cluster. This is the calling card of the Meow / Indexrm extortion campaign, an automated wipe-and-ransom operation. The marker indicates the attacker has already enumerated your cluster and either has wiped the data or is about to.

Sample marker content typically contains a ransom note pointing to a Bitcoin wallet and an email channel (wendy.etabw@gmx.com or one of two clone actor channels, scandal@onionmail.org, db-recovery@sharebot.net). We have separately reported all three channels to abuse contacts.

Do not pay. Our wallet-blockchain analysis (mempool.space) shows only ~5 victims across thousands of marked hosts have paid; the wallet has received roughly 0.018 BTC against a population of 4,400+ marked instances. Paying does not get your data back. The campaign is wipe-first, ransom-as-afterthought.

Why it matters

An attacker has planted the Meow extortion marker (index name ‘read_me’) on this cluster. Your AI knowledge base (‘ai-index’, 65 documents, 1536d OpenAI embeddings) is still alive. The attacker has not yet deleted it. Take it offline and restore from backup before they do.

One-line fix

Bind the Elasticsearch HTTP listener to the loopback interface and require authentication for any non-local client. For a Docker deployment:

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:9200:9200 -e xpack.security.enabled=true elasticsearch:8.12.2

If the cluster is on a host network: set network.host: 127.0.0.1 in elasticsearch.yml, restart, then put it behind a reverse proxy or VPN with authentication.

For OpenSearch clusters: enable the security plugin with plugins.security.disabled: false.

Reference

Companion case study with the full 22-host survey: AI-LLM-Infrastructure-OSINT/blob/main/case-studies/commercial/22-ai-stack-attribution-2026-05-17.md

Companion methodology notes:

• Snapshot vs delta measurement (Insight #29)
• WHOIS over slug heuristics for disclosure routing (Insight #04)

Happy to provide additional forensic detail if useful. No response is required.

Regards, Nicholas Michael Kloster / NuClide Research nicholas@nuclide-research.com