Kubernetes | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Misconfigured Docker API instances have become the target of a new malware campaign that transforms them into a cryptocurrency mining botnet. The attacks, designed to mine for Dero currency, is notable for its worm-like capabilities to propagate the malware to other exposed Docker instances and rope them into an ever-growing horde of mining bots. Kaspersky said it observed an unidentified threat actor gaining initial access to a running containerized infrastructure by exploiting an insecurely published Docker API, and then weaponizing that access to create the illicit cryptojacking network. "This led to the running containers being compromised and new ones being created not only to hijack the victim's resources for cryptocurrency mining but also to launch external attacks to propagate to other networks," security researcher Amged Wageh said . The attack chain is realized through two components: A propagation malware "nginx" that scans the internet for expos...

Microsoft has warned that using pre-made templates, such as out-of-the-box Helm charts, during Kubernetes deployments could open the door to misconfigurations and leak valuable data. "While these 'plug-and-play' options greatly simplify the setup process, they often prioritize ease of use over security," Michael Katchinskiy and Yossi Weizman from the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Research team said . "As a result, a large number of applications end up being deployed in a misconfigured state by default, exposing sensitive data, cloud resources, or even the entire environment to attackers." Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that allows developers to package, configure, and deploy applications and services onto Kubernetes clusters. It's part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes application packages are structured in the Helm packaging format called charts , which are YAML manifests and templates used to describe the Kuber...

Microsoft has revealed that a threat actor it tracks as Storm-1977 has conducted password spraying attacks against cloud tenants in the education sector over the past year. "The attack involves the use of AzureChecker.exe, a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that is being used by a wide range of threat actors," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in an analysis. The tech giant noted that it observed the binary to connect to an external server named "sac-auth.nodefunction[.]vip" to retrieve an AES-encrypted data that contains a list of password spray targets.  The tool also accepts as input a text file called "accounts.txt" that includes the username and password combinations to be used to carry out the password spray attack. "The threat actor then used the information from both files and posted the credentials to the target tenants for validation," Microsoft said. In one successful instance of account compromise observed by Redm...

There's a virtuous cycle in technology that pushes the boundaries of what's being built and how it's being used. A new technology development emerges and captures the world's attention. People start experimenting and discover novel applications, use cases, and approaches to maximize the innovation's potential. These use cases generate significant value, fueling demand for the next iteration of the innovation, and in turn, a new wave of innovators create the next generation of use cases, driving further advancements. Containerization has become the foundation of modern, cloud-native software development, supporting new use cases and approaches to building resilient, scalable, and portable applications. It also holds the keys to the next software delivery innovation, simultaneously necessitating the evolution to secure-by-design, continuously-updated software and serving as the means to get there. Below, I'll talk through some of the innovations that led to our containerized r...

Every week, someone somewhere slips up—and threat actors slip in. A misconfigured setting, an overlooked vulnerability, or a too-convenient cloud tool becomes the perfect entry point. But what happens when the hunters become the hunted? Or when old malware resurfaces with new tricks? Step behind the curtain with us this week as we explore breaches born from routine oversights—and the unexpected cracks they reveal in systems we trust. ⚡ Threat of the Week Google Patches Actively Exploited Chrome 0-Day — Google has addressed a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser for Windows that has been exploited by unknown actors as part of a sophisticated attack aimed at Russian entities. The flaw, CVE-2025-2783 (CVSS score: 8.3), is said to have been combined with another exploit to break out of the browser's sandbox and achieve remote code execution. The attacks involved distributing specially crafted links via phishing emails that, when clicked and launched using Chrome, trig...

A set of five critical security shortcomings have been disclosed in the Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution, putting over 6,500 clusters at immediate risk by exposing the component to the public internet. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-24513, CVE-2025-24514, CVE-2025-1097, CVE-2025-1098, and CVE-2025-1974 ), assigned a CVSS score of 9.8, have been collectively codenamed IngressNightmare by cloud security firm Wiz. It's worth noting that the shortcomings do not impact NGINX Ingress Controller , which is another ingress controller implementation for NGINX and NGINX Plus. "Exploitation of these vulnerabilities leads to unauthorized access to all secrets stored across all namespaces in the Kubernetes cluster by attackers, which can result in cluster takeover," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. IngressNightmare, at its core, affects the admission controller component of the Ingress N...

Microsoft is warning of an insecure practice wherein software developers are incorporating publicly disclosed ASP.NET machine keys from publicly accessible resources, thereby putting their applications in attackers' pathway. The tech giant's threat intelligence team said it observed limited activity in December 2024 that involved an unknown threat actor using a publicly available, static ASP.NET machine key to inject malicious code and deliver the Godzilla post-exploitation framework. It also noted that it has identified over 3,000 publicly disclosed keys that could be used for these types of attacks, which it's calling ViewState code injection attacks . "Whereas many previously known ViewState code injection attacks used compromised or stolen keys that are often sold on dark web forums, these publicly disclosed keys could pose a higher risk because they are available in multiple code repositories and could have been pushed into development code without modificat...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered three security weaknesses in Microsoft's Azure Data Factory Apache Airflow integration that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed an attacker to gain the ability to conduct various covert actions, including data exfiltration and malware deployment. "Exploiting these flaws could allow attackers to gain persistent access as shadow administrators over the entire Airflow Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in an analysis published earlier this month. The vulnerabilities, albeit classified as low severity by Microsoft, are listed below - Misconfigured Kubernetes RBAC in Airflow cluster Misconfigured secret handling of Azure's internal Geneva service, and Weak authentication for Geneva Besides obtaining unauthorized access, the attacker could take advantage of the flaws in the Geneva service to potentially tamper with log data or send fake logs to avoid raising suspicion when c...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two security flaws in Google's Vertex machine learning (ML) platform that, if successfully exploited, could allow malicious actors to escalate privileges and exfiltrate models from the cloud. "By exploiting custom job permissions, we were able to escalate our privileges and gain unauthorized access to all data services in the project," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Ofir Balassiano and Ofir Shaty said in an analysis published earlier this week. "Deploying a poisoned model in Vertex AI led to the exfiltration of all other fine-tuned models, posing a serious proprietary and sensitive data exfiltration attack risk." Vertex AI is Google's ML platform for training and deploying custom ML models and artificial intelligence (AI) applications at scale. It was first introduced in May 2021. Crucial to leveraging the privilege escalation flaw is a feature called Vertex AI Pipelines , which allows users to automat...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the Kubernetes Image Builder that, if successfully exploited, could be abused to gain root access under certain circumstances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-9486 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been addressed in version 0.1.38. The project maintainers acknowledged Nicolai Rybnikar for discovering and reporting the vulnerability. "A security issue was discovered in the Kubernetes Image Builder where default credentials are enabled during the image build process," Red Hat's Joel Smith said in an alert. "Additionally, virtual machine images built using the Proxmox provider do not disable these default credentials, and nodes using the resulting images may be accessible via these default credentials. The credentials can be used to gain root access." That having said, Kubernetes clusters are only impacted by the flaw if their nodes use virtual machine (VM) images created via the Image Builder project with the Prox...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security flaw impacting Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges and access credentials for services used by the cluster. "An attacker with command execution in a pod running within an affected Azure Kubernetes Services cluster could download the configuration used to provision the cluster node, extract the transport layer security (TLS) bootstrap tokens, and perform a TLS bootstrap attack to read all secrets within the cluster," Google-owned Mandiant said . Clusters using "Azure CNI" for the "Network configuration" and "Azure" for the "Network Policy" have been found to be impacted by the privilege escalation bug. Microsoft has since addressed the issue following responsible disclosure. The attack technique devised by the threat intelligence firm hinges on accessing a little-known component called Azure WireS...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of an ongoing cryptojacking campaign targeting misconfigured Kubernetes clusters to mine Dero cryptocurrency. Cloud security firm Wiz, which shed light on the activity, said it's an updated variant of a financially motivated operation that was first documented by CrowdStrike in March 2023. "In this incident, the threat actor abused anonymous access to an Internet-facing cluster to launch malicious container images hosted at Docker Hub, some of which have more than 10,000 pulls," Wiz researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Shay Berkovich, and Gili Tikochinski said . "These docker images contain a UPX-packed DERO miner named 'pause.'" Initial access is accomplished by targeting externally accessible Kubernetes API servers with anonymous authentication enabled to deliver the miner payloads. Unlike the 2023 version that deployed a Kubernetes DaemonSet named "proxy-api," the latest flavor makes use of seemingly b...

Threat actors are actively exploiting critical vulnerabilities in OpenMetadata to gain unauthorized access to Kubernetes workloads and leverage them for cryptocurrency mining activity. That's according to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which  said  the flaws have been weaponized since the start of April 2024. OpenMetadata is an  open-source platform  that operates as a metadata management tool, offering a unified solution for data asset discovery, observability, and governance. The flaws in question – all discovered and credited to security researcher Alvaro Muñoz – are listed below - CVE-2024-28847  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A Spring Expression Language (SpEL) injection vulnerability in PUT /api/v1/events/subscriptions (fixed in version 1.2.4) CVE-2024-28848  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A SpEL injection vulnerability in GET /api/v1/policies/validation/condition/<expr> (fixed in version 1.2.4) CVE-2024-28253  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A SpEL injecti...

Details have been made public about a now-patched high-severity flaw in Kubernetes that could allow a malicious attacker to achieve remote code execution with elevated privileges under specific circumstances. "The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled  said . "To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply malicious YAML files on the cluster." Tracked as CVE-2023-5528 (CVSS score: 7.2), the shortcoming impacts all versions of kubelet, including and after version 1.8.0. It was addressed as part of updates released on November 14, 2023, in the following versions - kubelet v1.28.4 kubelet v1.27.8 kubelet v1.26.11, and kubelet v1.25.16 "A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes where a user that can create pods and persistent volumes on Windows nodes may be able to escalate to admin privileges on those nodes," Kubernetes maintainers  s...