It's amazing that in 2018 people leave databases publicly exposed.
[0]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/mongodb-ransacking-starts-again...
I ask this because people expose web-apps on the Internet publicly too and an SQL injection vulnerability on the web-app would also be equally catastrophic.
I guess exposing web-apps on the Internet is a risk we need to accept because it has to be available to users of the Internet. But we should not expose anything else that we don't need to? Is that the reason why exposing databases publicly is considered best practice.
I would like to know what experienced professionals think about this.
If the database itself is publicly exposed, even if a read only connection with access to an empty table is provided an attacker could simply max out the connection pool to kill your application. If a vulnerability was published or a password with more access was available they can not only access all of your data but they can corrupt it and/or delete it.
SQL injection has been pretty trivial to stop for a couple of decades now.
Yes. Why would you ever need public logins from the open internet to your production database? Even if you need to ability to log in from a random computer, there are better ways, like requiring the use of a vpn so logins are always coming from a white listed ip.
The database OTOH represents an entire programming shell, e.g. extremely fine-grained and in many cases linked directly to the underlying system as was shown in this article - additionally, the number of entrypoints is undefined. If you somehow were convinced that you've locked down every single function of your database from attack, the next day you upgrade the database to a new version and it can very well expose new functions that are again exposed.
It’s really hard to move fast and stay secure. You have to nail so many things and you’re either running out of money or running out of time 99% of the time.