The Cat's Out of the Bag: A 'Meow Attack' Data Corruption Campaign Simulation via MAD-CAT

This report introduces MAD-CAT, an automated adversarial simulation tool that reproduces the Meow data-corruption campaign across six database platforms (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Redis, CouchDB, Hadoop HDFS). It describes a four-phase attack workflow (connect, enumerate, corrupt fields with the “-MEOW” signature, report), a Dockerized vulnerable test environment, single-target and CSV bulk attack modes, verification scripts, and Shodan-based trend analysis showing the Meow campaign’s large historical impact and its reduced but persistent presence in 2025.