Proxyjacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Misconfigured and vulnerable Linux servers are the target of an ongoing campaign that delivers a stealthy malware dubbed perfctl with the primary aim of running a cryptocurrency miner and proxyjacking software. "Perfctl is particularly elusive and persistent, employing several sophisticated techniques," Aqua security researchers Assaf Morag and Idan Revivo said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "When a new user logs into the server, it immediately stops all 'noisy' activities, lying dormant until the server is idle again. After execution, it deletes its binary and continues to run quietly in the background as a service." It's worth noting that some aspects of the campaign were disclosed last month by Cado Security, which detailed an activity cluster that targets internet-exposed Selenium Grid instances with both cryptocurrency mining and proxyjacking software. Specifically, the fileless perfctl malware has been found to exploit a security ...

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 ...

The problem is simple: all breaches start with initial access, and initial access comes down to two primary attack vectors – credentials and devices. This is not news; every report you can find on the threat landscape depicts the same picture.  The solution is more complex. For this article, we'll focus on the device threat vector. The risk they pose is significant, which is why device management tools like Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) are essential components of an organization's security infrastructure. However, relying solely on these tools to manage device risk actually creates a false sense of security. Instead of the blunt tools of device management, organizations are looking for solutions that deliver device trust . Device trust provides a comprehensive, risk-based approach to device security enforcement, closing the large gaps left behind by traditional device management solutions. Here are 5 of those limitations and how to ov...

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...