Kubernetes | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Three interrelated high-severity security flaws discovered in Kubernetes could be exploited to achieve remote code execution with elevated privileges on Windows endpoints within a cluster. The  issues , tracked as CVE-2023-3676, CVE-2023-3893, and CVE-2023-3955, carry CVSS scores of 8.8 and impact all Kubernetes environments with Windows nodes. Fixes for the vulnerabilities were  released  on August 23, 2023, following responsible disclosure by Akamai on July 13, 2023. "The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled said in a technical write-up shared with The Hacker News. "To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply a malicious YAML file on the cluster." Amazon Web Services  (AWS),  Google Cloud , and  Microsoft Azure  have all released advisories for the bugs, which affect the following versions of Kubelet - kube...

Exposed Kubernetes (K8s) clusters are being exploited by malicious actors to deploy cryptocurrency miners and other backdoors. Cloud security firm Aqua, in a  report  shared with The Hacker News, said a majority of the clusters belonged to small to medium-sized organizations, with a smaller subset tied to bigger companies, spanning financial, aerospace, automotive, industrial, and security sectors. In total, Kubernetes clusters belonging to more than 350 organizations, open-source projects, and individuals were discovered, 60% of which were the target of an active crypto-mining campaign. The publicly-accessible clusters, per Aqua, are said to suffer from two different kinds of misconfigurations: allowing anonymous access with high privileges and running kubectl proxy with the flags "--address=`0.0.0.0` --accept-hosts `.*`" "Housing a wide array of sensitive and valuable assets, Kubernetes clusters can store customer data, financial records, intellectual property, a...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...

As many as 196 hosts have been infected as part of an aggressive cloud campaign mounted by the TeamTNT group called  Silentbob . "The botnet run by TeamTNT has set its sights on Docker and Kubernetes environments, Redis servers, Postgres databases, Hadoop clusters, Tomcat and Nginx servers, Weave Scope, SSH, and Jupyter applications," Aqua security researchers Ofek Itach and Assaf Morag  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The focus this time seems to be more on infecting systems and testing the botnet, rather than deploying cryptominers for profit." The development arrives a week after the cloud security company  detailed  an intrusion set linked to the TeamTNT group that targets exposed JupyterLab and Docker APIs to deploy the Tsunami malware and hijack system resources to run a cryptocurrency miner. The latest findings suggest a broader campaign and the use of a larger attack infrastructure than previously thought, including various shell sc...

A large-scale attack campaign discovered in the wild has been exploiting Kubernetes (K8s) Role-Based Access Control ( RBAC ) to create backdoors and run cryptocurrency miners. "The attackers also deployed DaemonSets to take over and hijack resources of the K8s clusters they attack," cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The Israeli company, which dubbed the attack  RBAC Buster , said it found 60 exposed K8s clusters that have been exploited by the threat actor behind this campaign. The attack chain commenced with the attacker gaining initial access via a misconfigured API server, followed by checking for evidence of competing miner malware on the compromised server, and then using RBAC to set up persistence. "The attacker created a new ClusterRole with near admin-level privileges," the company said. "Next, the attacker created a 'ServiceAccount', 'kube-controller' in the 'kube-system' namespace. Las...

Recently, Andrew Martin, founder and CEO of ControlPlane, released a report entitled Cloud Native and Kubernetes Security Predictions 2023. These predictions underscore the rapidly evolving landscape of Kubernetes and cloud security, emphasizing the need for organizations to stay informed and adopt comprehensive security solutions to protect their digital assets. In response,  Uptycs , the first unified CNAPP and XDR platform, released a whitepaper, " 14 Kubernetes and Cloud Security Predictions for 2023 and How Uptycs Meets Them Head-On " addressing the most pressing challenges and trends in Kubernetes and cloud security for 2023. Uptycs explains how their unified CNAPP and XDR solution is designed to tackle these emerging challenges head-on.  Read on for key takeaways from the whitepaper and learn how Uptycs helps modern organizations successfully navigate the evolving landscape of Kubernetes and cloud security.  14 Kubernetes and Cloud Security Predictions for 2023...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered the first-ever illicit cryptocurrency mining campaign used to mint Dero since the start of February 2023. "The novel Dero cryptojacking operation concentrates on locating Kubernetes clusters with anonymous access enabled on a Kubernetes API and listening on non-standard ports accessible from the internet," CrowdStrike  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The development marks a notable shift from Monero, which is a prevalent cryptocurrency used in such campaigns. It's suspected it may have to do with the fact that  Dero  "offers larger rewards and provides the same or better anonymizing features." The attacks, attributed to an unknown financially motivated actor, commence with scanning for Kubernetes clusters with authentication set as  --anonymous-auth=true , which allows anonymous requests to the server, to drop initial payloads from three different U.S.-based IP addresses. This includes deploying ...

Container technology has gained traction among businesses due to the increased efficiency it provides. In this regard, organizations widely use Kubernetes for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Organizations should audit Kubernetes to ensure compliance with regulations, find anomalies, and identify security risks. The Wazuh open source platform plays a critical role in monitoring Kubernetes and other components of an organization's infrastructure. What is Kubernetes? Kubernetes is an open source container management solution that automates the deployment and scaling of containers and also manages the life cycle of containers. It organizes containers into logical units for simple management and discovery. Kubernetes extends how we scale containerized applications so that we may use a truly persistent infrastructure. You can build cloud-native applications based on microservices with Kubernetes. Enthusiasts view Kubernetes as the cornerstone of application m...

The threat actors behind the  Kinsing  cryptojacking operation have been spotted exploiting misconfigured and exposed PostgreSQL servers to obtain initial access to Kubernetes environments. A second initial access vector technique entails the use of vulnerable images, Sunders Bruskin, security researcher at Microsoft Defender for Cloud,  said  in a report last week. Kinsing has a  storied history  of targeting  containerized environments , often leveraging misconfigured open Docker daemon API ports as well as abusing newly disclosed exploits to drop cryptocurrency mining software. The threat actor, in the past, has also been discovered  employing a rootkit  to hide its presence, in addition to terminating and uninstalling competing resource-intensive services and processes. Now according to Microsoft, misconfigurations in  PostgreSQL servers  have been co-opted by the Kinsing actor to gain an initial foothold, with the company...

IBM has fixed a high-severity security vulnerability affecting its Cloud Databases (ICD) for PostgreSQL product that could be potentially exploited to tamper with internal repositories and run unauthorized code. The privilege escalation flaw (CVSS score: 8.8), dubbed " Hell's Keychain " by cloud security firm Wiz, has been described as a "first-of-its-kind supply-chain attack vector impacting a cloud provider's infrastructure." Successful exploitation of the bug could enable a malicious actor to remotely execute code in customers' environments and even read or modify data stored in the PostgreSQL database. "The vulnerability consists of a chain of three exposed secrets (Kubernetes service account token, private container registry password, CI/CD server credentials) coupled with overly permissive network access to internal build servers," Wiz researchers Ronen Shustin and Shir Tamari  said . Hell's Keychain commences with an SQL inject...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Quarkus Java framework that could be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4116  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming could be trivially abused by a malicious actor without any privileges. "The vulnerability is found in the Dev UI Config Editor, which is vulnerable to drive-by localhost attacks that could lead to remote-code execution (RCE)," Contrast Security researcher Joseph Beeton, who reported the bug,  said  in a write-up. Quarkus, developed by Red Hat, is an  open source project  that's used for creating Java applications in  containerized  and serverless environments. It's worth pointing out that the  issue  only impacts developers who are running Quarkus and are tricked into visiting a specially crafted website, which is embedded with malicious JavaScript code designed to install or execute arbitrary payload...

A new cryptojacking campaign has been uncovered targeting vulnerable Docker and Kubernetes infrastructures as part of opportunistic attacks designed to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike dubbed the activity  Kiss-a-dog , with its command-and-control infrastructure overlapping with those associated with other groups like  TeamTNT , which are known to  strike   misconfigured  Docker and Kubernetes instances. The intrusions, spotted in September 2022, get their name from a domain named "kiss.a-dog[.]top" that's used to trigger a shell script payload on the compromised container using a Base64-encoded Python command. "The URL used in the payload is obscured with backslashes to defeat automated decoding and regex matching to retrieve the malicious domain," CrowdStrike researcher Manoj Ahuje  said  in a technical analysis. The attack chain subsequently attempts to escape the container and move laterally into the breached n...

Google on Monday introduced a new bug bounty program for its open source projects, offering payouts anywhere from $100 to $31,337 (a reference to  eleet or leet ) to secure the ecosystem from  supply chain attacks . Called the Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program (OSS VRP), the offering is one of the first open source-specific vulnerability programs. With the tech giant the maintainer of major projects such as Angular, Bazel, Golang, Protocol Buffers, and Fuchsia, the program aims to reward vulnerability discoveries that could otherwise have a significant impact on the larger open source landscape.  Other projects managed by Google and hosted on public repositories such as GitHub as well as the third-party dependencies that are included in those projects are also eligible. Submissions  from bug hunters are expected to meet the following criteria - Vulnerabilities that lead to supply chain compromise Design issues that cause product vulnerabilit...

A newly disclosed security vulnerability in the Kubernetes container engine CRI-O called  cr8escape  could be exploited by an attacker to break out of containers and obtain root access to the host. "Invocation of CVE-2022-0811 can allow an attacker to perform a variety of actions on objectives, including execution of malware, exfiltration of data, and lateral movement across pods," CrowdStrike researchers John Walker and Manoj Ahuje  said  in an analysis published this week. A lightweight alternative to Docker,  CRI-O  is a  container runtime  implementation of the Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) that's used to pull container images from registries and launch an Open Container Initiative ( OCI )-compatible runtime such as runC to spawn and run container processes. The vulnerability is rated 8.8 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and affects CRI-O versions 1.19 and later. Following responsible disclosure, patches have been r...

Users of the Argo continuous deployment (CD) tool for Kubernetes are being urged to push through updates after a zero-day vulnerability was found that could allow an attacker to extract sensitive information such as passwords and API keys. The flaw, tagged as  CVE-2022-24348  (CVSS score: 7.7), affects all versions and has been addressed in versions 2.3.0, 2.2.4, and 2.1.9. Cloud security firm Apiiro has been credited with discovering and reporting the bug on January 30, 2022s. Continuous deployment, also called continuous delivery, refers to a process that automatically deploys all code changes to the testing and/or production environment after they are tested and merged to a shared repository. Argo CD is officially used by  191 organizations , including Alibaba Group, BMW Group, Deloitte, Gojek, IBM, Intuit, LexisNexis, Red Hat, Skyscanner, Swisscom, and Ticketmaster. The path-traversal vulnerability "allows malicious actors to load a Kubernetes  Helm Chart Y...

2021 was a year peppered by cyberattacks, with numerous data breaches happening. Not only that, but ransomware has also become a prominent player in the hackers' world. Now, more than ever, it's important for enterprises to step up cybersecurity measures. They can do this through several pieces of technology, such as an open-source security platform like Wazuh .  Wazuh is a free and open source security platform that unifies XDR and SIEM capabilities, which not only enables companies to detect sophisticated threats, but can also help immensely in preventing data breaches and leaks from happening. As a result, it can save businesses from costly fixes that can ultimately end in their closure. It is also possible to integrate Wazuh with a number of external services and tools. Some of them are VirusTotal, YARA, Amazon Macie, Slack, and Fortigate Firewall. Consequently, companies can improve their security against hackers from penetrating their networks. What's great abou...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a new large-scale campaign targeting Kubeflow deployments to run malicious cryptocurrency mining containers. The campaign involved deploying  TensorFlow  pods on Kubernetes clusters, with the pods running legitimate  TensorFlow images  from the official Docker Hub account. However, the container images were configured to execute rogue commands that mine cryptocurrencies. Microsoft said the deployments witnessed an uptick towards the end of May. Kubeflow  is an open-source machine learning platform designed to deploy machine learning workflows on  Kubernetes , an orchestration service used for managing and scaling containerized workloads across a cluster of machines. The deployment, in itself, was achieved by taking advantage of Kubeflow, which exposes its UI functionality via a dashboard that is deployed in the cluster. In the attack observed by Microsoft, the adversaries used the centralized dashboard as ...