Qubitstrike Targets Jupyter Notebooks with Crypto Mining and Rootkit Campaign
Oct 18, 2023
Rootkit / Cryptocurrency
A threat actor, presumably from Tunisia, has been linked to a new campaign targeting exposed Jupyter Notebooks in a two-fold attempt to illicitly mine cryptocurrency and breach cloud environments. Dubbed Qubitstrike by Cado, the intrusion set utilizes Telegram API to exfiltrate cloud service provider credentials following a successful compromise. "The payloads for the Qubitstrike campaign are all hosted on codeberg.org – an alternative Git hosting platform, providing much of the same functionality as GitHub," security researchers Matt Muir and Nate Bill said in a Wednesday write-up. In the attack chain documented by the cloud security firm, publicly accessible Jupyter instances are breached to execute commands to retrieve a shell script (mi.sh) hosted on Codeberg. The shell script, which acts as the primary payload, is responsible for executing a cryptocurrency miner, establishing persistence by means of a cron job, inserting an attacker-controlled key to the .ssh/a