Proxyjacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new, financially motivated operation dubbed  LABRAT  has been observed weaponizing a now-patched critical flaw in GitLab as part of a cryptojacking and proxyjacking campaign. "The attacker utilized undetected signature-based tools, sophisticated and stealthy cross-platform malware, command-and-control (C2) tools which bypassed firewalls, and kernel-based rootkits to hide their presence," Sysdig  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Furthermore, the attacker abused a legitimate service,  TryCloudflare , to obfuscate their C2 network." Proxyjacking  allows the attacker to rent the compromised host out to a proxy network, making it possible to monetize the unused bandwidth. Cryptojacking, on the other hand, refers to the abuse of the system resources to mine cryptocurrency. A notable aspect of the campaign is the use of compiled binaries written in Go and .NET to fly under the radar, with LABRAT also providing backdoor access to the infected systems.

An active financially motivated campaign is targeting vulnerable SSH servers to covertly ensnare them into a proxy network. "This is an active campaign in which the attacker leverages SSH for remote access, running malicious scripts that stealthily enlist victim servers into a peer-to-peer (P2P) proxy network, such as Peer2Profit or Honeygain," Akamai researcher Allen West said in a Thursday report. Unlike cryptojacking, in which a compromised system's resources are used to illicitly mine cryptocurrency, proxyjacking offers the ability for threat actors to leverage the victim's unused bandwidth to clandestinely run different services as a P2P node. This offers two-fold benefits: It not only enables the attacker to monetize the extra bandwidth with a significantly reduced resource load that would be necessary to carry out cryptojacking, it also reduces the chances of discovery. "It is a stealthier alternative to cryptojacking and has serious implications th

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