Update: Atlassian reached out to confirm that the affected database does NOT belong to them. The database was part of a personal project from one of their developers, with no relation to his work at the company.

Meow is a new operation scanning the internet for open databases and deleting them. It’s been active for a couple of weeks and has deleted more than 4000 databases as measured by Shodan.

You can find new questions on Stack Overflow from developers getting their databases deleted:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63067062/elastic-search-indexes-gets-deleted-frequently

This last question was raised by an employee from Atlassian (JIRA). His ElasticSearch database has been deleted repeatedly since Tuesday 21th July.

Judging by the logs, this is an ElasticSearch cluster alongside a Kibana. The “meow” strings indicate it was wide open to the internet and got deleted.

This may or may not be a production database and this may or may not be from Atlassian.

The amount of indexes would be consistent with a new index getting created every hour or so, common practice for a logging cluster. 20ish new indexes got removed -today-, all created since the database was wiped clean once -yesterday-, that would make sense.

Given the information at hands, a complete logging cluster running in the cloud. This looks a lot like production systems.