The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: botnet

Cybersecurity agencies in the US and UK yesterday issued a joint advisory about a massive ongoing malware threat infecting Taiwanese company QNAP's network-attached storage (NAS) appliances. Called QSnatch (or Derek), the data-stealing malware is said to have compromised 62,000 devices since reports emerged last October, with a high degree of infection in Western Europe and North America. "All QNAP NAS devices are potentially vulnerable to QSnatch malware if not updated with the latest security fixes," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said in the alert. "Further, once a device has been infected, attackers can prevent administrators from successfully running firmware updates." The mode of compromise, i.e., the infection vector, still remains unclear, but CISA and NCSC said the first campaign likely began in 2014 and continued till mid-2017 before intensifying over th

Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab said it partnered with tech giant Baidu to disrupt a malware botnet infecting over hundreds of thousands of systems. The botnet was traced back to a group it calls ShuangQiang (also called Double Gun ), which has been behind several attacks since 2017 aimed at compromising Windows computers with MBR and VBR bootkits , and installing malicious drivers for financial gain and hijack web traffic to e-commerce sites. In addition to using images uploaded to Baidu Tieba to distribute configuration files and malware — a technique called steganography — the group has begun using Alibaba Cloud storage to host configuration files and Baidu's analytics platform Tongji to manage the activity of its infected hosts, the researchers said. The initial compromise relies on luring unsuspecting users to install game launching software from sketchy game portals that contain malicious code under the guise of a patch. Once the user downloads and inst

Cybersecurity researchers from ESET on Thursday said they took down a portion of a malware botnet comprising at least 35,000 compromised Windows systems that attackers were secretly using to mine Monero cryptocurrency. The botnet, named "VictoryGate," has been active since May 2019, with infections mainly reported in Latin America, particularly Peru accounting for 90% of the compromised devices. "The main activity of the botnet is mining Monero cryptocurrency," ESET said . "The victims include organizations in both public and private sectors, including financial institutions." ESET said it worked with dynamic DNS provider No-IP to take down the malicious command-and-control (C2) servers and that it set up fake domains (aka sinkholes) to monitor the botnet's activity. The sinkhole data shows that between 2,000 and 3,500 infected computers connected to the C2 servers on a daily basis during February and March this year. According to ESET res

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new emerging IoT botnet threat that leverages compromised smart devices to stage ' distributed denial-of-service ' attacks, potentially triggered on-demand through platforms offering DDoS-for-hire services. The botnet, named "dark_nexus" by Bitdefender researchers, works by employing credential stuffing attacks against a variety of devices, such as routers (from Dasan Zhone, Dlink, and ASUS), video recorders, and thermal cameras, to co-opt them into the botnet. So far, dark_nexus comprises at least 1,372 bots, acting as a reverse proxy, spanning across various locations in China, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, and Russia. "While it might share some features with previously known IoT botnets, the way some of its modules have been developed makes it significantly more potent and robust," the researchers said . "For example, payloads are compiled for 12 different CPU architectures and dynamically deliver

Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in digital video recorders (DVRs) for surveillance systems manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN have been exploited by botnet operators to infect and co-opt vulnerable devices into a family of denial-of-service bots. The findings come from Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 's Netlab team, who say different attack groups have been using LILIN DVR zero-day vulnerabilities to spread Chalubo , FBot , and Moobot botnets at least since August 30, 2019. Netlab researchers said they reached out to LILIN on January 19, 2020, although it wasn't until a month later the vendor released a firmware update (2.0b60_20200207) addressing the vulnerabilities. The development comes as IoT devices are increasingly being used as an attack surface to launch DDoS attacks and as proxies to engage in various forms of cybercrime. What Are the LILIN Zero-Days About? The flaw in itself concerns a chain of vulnerabilities that make use of hard-coded login cred