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A variant of the Mirai botnet known as MooBot is co-opting vulnerable D-Link devices into an army of denial-of-service bots by taking advantage of multiple exploits. "If the devices are compromised, they will be fully controlled by attackers, who could utilize those devices to conduct further attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Tuesday report. MooBot, first disclosed by Qihoo 360's Netlab team in September 2019, has previously targeted  LILIN digital video recorders  and  Hikvision video surveillance products  to expand its network. In the latest wave of attacks discovered by Unit 42 in early August 2022, as many as four different flaws in D-Link devices, both old and new, have paved the way for the deployment of MooBot samples. These include - CVE-2015-2051  (CVSS score: 10.0) - D-Link HNAP SOAPAction Header Command Execution Vulnerability CVE-2018-6530  (CVSS score: 9.8) - D-Link SOAP Interface Re

A new botnet named Orchard has been observed using Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's account transaction information to generate domain names to conceal its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. "Because of the uncertainty of Bitcoin transactions, this technique is more unpredictable than using the common time-generated [ domain generation algorithms ], and thus more difficult to defend against," researchers from Qihoo 360's Netlab security team said in a Friday write-up. Orchard is said to have undergone three revisions since February 2021, with the botnet primarily used to deploy additional payloads onto a victim's machine and execute commands received from the C2 server. It's also designed to upload device and user information as well as infect USB storage devices to propagate the malware. Netlab's analysis shows that over 3,000 hosts have been enslaved by the malware to date, most of them located in China. Orchard has also been subjected to

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A new IoT botnet malware dubbed RapperBot has been observed rapidly evolving its capabilities since it was first discovered in mid-June 2022. "This family borrows heavily from the original  Mirai source code , but what separates it from other IoT malware families is its built-in capability to brute force credentials and gain access to SSH servers instead of Telnet as implemented in Mirai," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report. The malware, which gets its name from an embedded URL to a YouTube rap music video in an earlier version, is said to have amassed a growing collection of compromised SSH servers, with over 3,500 unique IP addresses used to scan and brute-force their way into the servers. RapperBot's current implementation also delineates it from Mirai, allowing it to primarily function as an SSH brute-force tool with limited capabilities to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The deviation from traditional Mirai behavior is further

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. "It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dark Utilities, which emerged in early 2022, is advertised as a "C2-as-a-Service" (C2aaS), offering access to infrastructure hosted on the clearnet as well as the TOR network and associated payloads with support for Windows, Linux, and Python-based implementations for a mere €9.99. Authenticated users on the platform are presented with a dashboard that makes it possible to generate new payloads tailored to a specific operating system that can then be deployed and executed on victim hosts. Additionally, users are provided an administrative panel

The botnet behind the largest HTTPS distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June 2022 has been linked to a spate of attacks aimed at nearly 1,000 Cloudflare customers. Calling the powerful botnet  Mantis , the web performance and security company attributed it to more than 3,000 HTTP DDoS attacks against its users. The most attacked industry verticals include internet and telecom, media, gaming, finance, business, and shopping, of which over 20% of the attacks targeted U.S.-based companies, followed by Russia, Turkey, France, Poland, Ukraine, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada. Last month, the company said it  mitigated  a record-breaking DDoS attack aimed at an unnamed customer website using its Free plan that peaked at 26 million requests per second (RPS), with each node generating approximately 5,200 RPS. The tsunami of junk traffic lasted less than 30 seconds and generated more than 212 million HTTPS requests from more than 1,500 networks in 121 countries,

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday disclosed that it took down the infrastructure associated with a Russian botnet known as RSOCKS in collaboration with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K. The botnet, operated by a sophisticated cybercrime organization, is believed to have ensnared millions of internet-connected devices, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Android phones, and computers for use as a proxy service. Botnets, a constantly evolving threat, are networks of hijacked computer devices that are under the control of a single attacking party and are used to facilitate a variety of large-scale cyber intrusions such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, email spam, and cryptojacking. "The RSOCKS botnet offered its clients access to IP addresses assigned to devices that had been hacked," the DoJ  said  in a press release. "The owners of these devices did not give the RSOCKS operator(s) authority to ac

A new Golang-based peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet has been spotted actively targeting Linux servers in the education sector since its emergence in March 2022. Dubbed  Panchan  by Akamai Security Research, the malware "utilizes its built-in concurrency features to maximize spreadability and execute malware modules" and "harvests SSH keys to perform lateral movement." The feature-packed botnet, which relies on a basic list of default SSH passwords to carry out a  dictionary attack  and expand its reach, primarily functions as a cryptojacker designed to hijack a computer's resources to mine cryptocurrencies. The cybersecurity and cloud service company noted it first spotted Panchan's activity on March 19, 2022, and attributed the malware to a likely Japanese threat actor based on the language used in the administrative panel baked into the binary to edit the mining configuration. Panchan is known to deploy and execute two miners, XMRig and nbhash, on the host

Fronton, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet that came to light in March 2020, is much more powerful than previously thought, per the latest research. "Fronton is a system developed for coordinated inauthentic behavior on a massive scale," threat intelligence firm Nisos said in a  report  published last week. "This system includes a web-based dashboard known as SANA that enables a user to formulate and deploy trending social media events en masse. The system creates these events that it refers to as Инфоповоды, 'newsbreaks,' utilizing the botnet as a geographically distributed transport." The existence of Fronton, an IoT botnet, became public knowledge following revelations from  BBC Russia  and  ZDNet  in March 2020 after a Russian hacker group known as Digital Revolution published documents that it claimed were obtained after breaking into a subcontractor to the FSB, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Further investigat

A Linux botnet malware known as XorDdos has witnessed a 254% surge in activity over the last six months, according to latest research from Microsoft. The trojan, so named for carrying out denial-of-service attacks on Linux systems and its use of XOR-based encryption for communications with its command-and-control (C2) server, is  known  to have been  active  since at least 2014. "XorDdos' modular nature provides attackers with a versatile trojan capable of infecting a variety of Linux system architectures," Ratnesh Pandey, Yevgeny Kulakov, and Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in an exhaustive deep-dive of the malware. "Its SSH brute-force attacks are a relatively simple yet effective technique for gaining root access over a number of potential targets." Remote control over vulnerable IoT and other internet-connected devices is gained by means of secure shell (SSH) brute-force attacks, enabling the malware to form a botnet

Microsoft is warning of a new variant of the Sysrv botnet that's exploiting multiple security flaws in web applications and databases to install coin miners on both Windows and Linux systems. The tech giant, which has called the new version Sysrv-K , is said to weaponize an  array of exploits  to gain control of web servers. The cryptojacking botnet first emerged in December 2020. "Sysrv-K scans the internet to find web servers with various vulnerabilities to install itself," the company  said  in a series of tweets. "The vulnerabilities range from path traversal and remote file disclosure to arbitrary file download and remote code execution vulnerabilities." This also includes  CVE-2022-22947  (CVSS score: 10.0), a code injection vulnerability in Spring Cloud Gateway that could be exploited to allow arbitrary remote execution on a remote host via a maliciously crafted request. It's worth noting that the abuse of CVE-2022-22947 has prompted the U.S. Cy

A new variant of an IoT botnet called BotenaGo has emerged in the wild, specifically singling out Lilin security camera DVR devices to infect them with Mirai malware. Dubbed " Lilin Scanner " by Nozomi Networks, the  latest version  is designed to exploit a two-year-old critical  command injection vulnerability  in the DVR firmware that was patched by the Taiwanese company in February 2020. BotenaGo , first documented in November 2021 by AT&T Alien Labs, is written in Golang and features over 30 exploits for known vulnerabilities in web servers, routers and other kinds of IoT devices. The botnet's source code has since been uploaded to GitHub, making it ripe for abuse by other criminal actors. "With only 2,891 lines of code, BotenaGo has the potential to be the starting point for many new variants and new malware families using its source code," the researchers  said  this year. The new BotenaGo malware is the  latest  to exploit vulnerabilities in Lil

LemonDuck, a cross-platform cryptocurrency mining botnet, is targeting Docker to mine cryptocurrency on Linux systems as part of an active malware campaign. "It runs an anonymous mining operation by the use of proxy pools, which hide the wallet addresses," CrowdStrike  said  in a new report. "It evades detection by targeting Alibaba Cloud's monitoring service and disabling it." Known to strike both Windows and Linux environments, LemonDuck is primarily engineered for abusing the system resources to mine Monero. But it's also capable of credential theft, lateral movement, and facilitating the deployment of additional payloads for follow-on activities. "It uses a wide range of spreading mechanisms — phishing emails, exploits, USB devices, brute force, among others — and it has shown that it can quickly take advantage of news, events, or the release of new exploits to run effective campaigns," Microsoft  detailed  in a technical write-up of the ma

A threat group that pursues crypto mining and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been linked to a new botnet called Enemybot, which has been discovered enslaving routers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices since last month. "This botnet is mainly derived from  Gafgyt 's source code but has been observed to borrow several modules from  Mirai 's original source code," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report this week. The botnet has been attributed to an actor named Keksec (aka  Kek Security , Necro, and  FreakOut ), which has been linked to multiple botnets such as  Simps ,  Ryuk  (not to be confused with the ransomware of the same name), and  Samael , and has a history of targeting cloud infrastructure to carry out crypto mining and DDoS operations. Primarily targeting routers from Seowon Intech, D-Link, and iRZ to propagate its infections and grow in volume, an analysis of the malware specimen has highlighted Enemybot's obfuscation attemp

Microsoft and a consortium of cybersecurity companies took legal and technical steps to disrupt the ZLoader botnet , seizing control of 65 domains that were used to control and communicate with the infected hosts. "ZLoader is made up of computing devices in businesses, hospitals, schools, and homes around the world and is run by a global internet-based organized crime gang operating malware as a service that is designed to steal and extort money," Amy Hogan-Burney, general manager of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU),  said . The operation, Microsoft said, was undertaken in collaboration with ESET, Lumen's Black Lotus Labs, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, Avast, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (H-ISAC). As a result of the disruption, the domains are now redirected to a sinkhole, effectively preventing the botnet's criminal operators from contacting the compromised devices.

The recently disclosed critical Spring4Shell vulnerability is being actively exploited by threat actors to execute the Mirai botnet malware , particularly in the Singapore region since the start of April 2022. "The exploitation allows threat actors to download the Mirai sample to the '/tmp' folder and execute them after permission change using 'chmod ,'" Trend Micro researchers Deep Patel, Nitesh Surana, Ashish Verma said in a report published Friday. Tracked as CVE-2022-22965 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability could allow malicious actors to achieve remote code execution in Spring Core applications under non-default circumstances, granting the attackers full control over the compromised devices. The development comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) earlier this week added the Spring4Shell vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog based on "evidence of active exploitation." This is

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that it neutralized Cyclops Blink , a modular botnet controlled by a threat actor known as Sandworm, which has been attributed to the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). "The operation copied and removed malware from vulnerable internet-connected firewall devices that Sandworm used for command-and-control (C2) of the underlying botnet," the DoJ  said  in a statement Wednesday. In addition to disrupting its C2 infrastructure, the operation also closed the external management ports that the threat actor used to establish connections with the firewall appliances, effectively severing contact and preventing the hacking group from using the infected devices to commandeer the botnet. The March 22 court-authorized disruption of Cyclops Blink comes a little over a month after intelligence agencies in the U.K. and the U.S.  described  the botnet as a replacement fram

A variant of the Mirai botnet called Beastmode has been observed adopting newly disclosed vulnerabilities in TOTOLINK routers between February and March 2022 to infect unpatched devices and expand its reach potentially. "The Beastmode (aka B3astmode) Mirai-based DDoS campaign has aggressively updated its arsenal of exploits," Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs Research team  said . "Five new exploits were added within a month, with three targeting various models of TOTOLINK routers." The list of exploited vulnerabilities in TOTOLINK routers is as follows - CVE-2022-26210  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability that could be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution CVE-2022-26186  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability affecting TOTOLINK N600R and A7100RU routers, and CVE-2022-25075 to CVE-2022-25084  (CVSS scores: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability impacting multiple TOTOLINK routers, leading to code execution The other e

Muhstik, a botnet infamous for propagating via web application exploits, has been observed targeting Redis servers using a recently disclosed vulnerability in the database system. The vulnerability relates to  CVE-2022-0543 , a  Lua sandbox escape flaw  in the open-source, in-memory, key-value data store that could be abused to achieve remote code execution on the underlying machine. The vulnerability is rated 10 out of 10 for severity. "Due to a packaging issue, a remote attacker with the ability to execute arbitrary Lua scripts could possibly escape the Lua sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the host," Ubuntu noted in an advisory released last month. According to  telemetry data  gathered by Juniper Threat Labs, the attacks leveraging the new flaw are said to have commenced on March 11, 2022, leading to the retrieval of a malicious shell script ("russia.sh") from a remote server, which is then utilized to fetch and execute the botnet binaries from another s

Vulnerable routers from MikroTik have been misused to form what cybersecurity researchers have called one of the largest botnet-as-a-service cybercrime operations seen in recent years.  According to a new piece of research published by Avast, a cryptocurrency mining campaign leveraging the new-disrupted  Glupteba botnet  as well as the infamous TrickBot malware were all distributed using the same command-and-control (C2) server. "The C2 server serves as a botnet-as-a-service controlling nearly 230,000 vulnerable MikroTik routers," Avast's senior malware researcher, Martin Hron,  said  in a write-up, potentially linking it to what's now called the Mēris botnet. The botnet is known to exploit a known vulnerability in the Winbox component of MikroTik routers ( CVE-2018-14847 ), enabling the attackers to gain unauthenticated, remote administrative access to any affected device. Parts of the Mēris botnet were  sinkholed  in late  September 2021 . "The  CVE-2018-

ASUS routers have emerged as the target of a nascent botnet called Cyclops Blink , almost a month after it was revealed the malware abused WatchGuard firewall appliances as a stepping stone to gain remote access to breached networks. According to a  new report  published by Trend Micro, the botnet's "main purpose is to build an infrastructure for further attacks on high-value targets," given that none of the infected hosts "belong to critical organizations, or those that have an evident value on economic, political, or military espionage." Intelligence agencies from the U.K. and the U.S. have  characterized  Cyclops Blink as a replacement framework for  VPNFilter , another malware that has exploited network devices, primarily small office/home office (SOHO) routers, and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Both VPNFilter and Cyclops Blink have been attributed to a Russian state-sponsored actor tracked as Sandworm (aka Voodoo Bear), which has also been li