Docker Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The infamous cryptojacking group known as TeamTNT appears to be readying for a new large-scale campaign targeting cloud-native environments for mining cryptocurrencies and renting out breached servers to third-parties. "The group is currently targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy Sliver malware, a cyber worm, and cryptominers, using compromised servers and Docker Hub as the infrastructure to spread their malware," Assaf Morag, director of threat intelligence at cloud security firm Aqua, said in a report published Friday. The attack activity is once again a testament to the threat actor's persistence and its ability to evolve its tactics and mounting multi-stage assaults with the goal of compromising Docker environments and enlisting them into a Docker Swarm. Besides using Docker Hub to host and distribute their malicious payloads, TeamTNT has been observed offering the victims' computational power to other parties for illicit cryptocurrency mining, thus di...

Bad actors have been observed targeting Docker remote API servers to deploy the SRBMiner crypto miner on compromised instances, according to new findings from Trend Micro. "In this attack, the threat actor used the gRPC protocol over h2c to evade security solutions and execute their crypto mining operations on the Docker host," researchers Abdelrahman Esmail and Sunil Bharti said in a technical report published today. "The attacker first checked the availability and version of the Docker API, then proceeds with requests for gRPC/h2c upgrades and gRPC methods to manipulate Docker functionalities." It all starts with the attacker conducting a discovery process to check for public-facing Docker API hosts and the availability of HTTP/2 protocol upgrades in order to follow up with a connection upgrade request to the h2c protocol (i.e., HTTP/2 sans TLS encryption). The adversary also proceeds to check for gRPC methods that are designed to carry out various tasks...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new cryptojacking campaign targeting the Docker Engine API with the goal of co-opting the instances to join a malicious Docker Swarm controlled by the threat actor. This enabled the attackers to "use Docker Swarm's orchestration features for command-and-control (C2) purposes," Datadog researchers Matt Muir and Andy Giron said in an analysis. The attacks leverage Docker for initial access to deploy a cryptocurrency miner on compromised containers, while also fetching and executing additional payloads that are responsible for conducting lateral movement to related hosts running Docker, Kubernetes, or SSH. Specifically, this involves identifying unauthenticated and exposed Docker API endpoints using Internet scanning tools, such as masscan and ZGrab . On vulnerable endpoints, the Docker API is used to spawn an Alpine container and then retrieve an initialization shell script (init.sh) from a remote server ("solscan[.]liv...

Vulnerable Docker services are being targeted by a novel campaign in which the threat actors are deploying XMRig cryptocurrency miner as well as the 9Hits Viewer software as part of a multi-pronged monetization strategy. "This is the first documented case of malware deploying the 9Hits application as a payload," cloud security firm Cado said , adding the development is a sign that adversaries are always on the lookout for diversifying their strategies to make money off compromised hosts. 9Hits advertises itself as a "unique web traffic solution" and an "automatic traffic exchange" that allows members of the service to drive traffic to their sites in exchange for purchasing credits. This is accomplished by means of a software called 9Hits Viewer, which runs a headless Chrome browser instance to visit websites requested by other members, for which they earn credits to pay for generating traffic to their sites. The exact method used to spread the malwa...