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A new malware called  Condi  has been observed exploiting a security vulnerability in TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) Wi-Fi routers to rope the devices into a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet. Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  the campaign has ramped up since the end of May 2023. Condi is the work of a threat actor who goes by the online alias zxcr9999 on Telegram and runs a Telegram channel called Condi Network to advertise their warez. "The Telegram channel was started in May 2022, and the threat actor has been monetizing its botnet by providing DDoS-as-a-service and selling the malware source code," security researchers Joie Salvio and Roy Tay said. An analysis of the malware artifact reveals its ability to terminate other competing botnets on the same host. It, however, lacks a persistence mechanism, meaning the program cannot survive a system reboot. To get around this limitation, the malware deletes multiple binaries that are used to shut down or reboot the

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered previously undocumented payloads associated with a Romanian threat actor named  Diicot , revealing its potential for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The Diicot name is significant, as it's also the name of the  Romanian organized crime and anti-terrorism policing unit ," Cado Security  said  in a technical report. "In addition, artifacts from the group's campaigns contain messaging and imagery related to this organization." Diicot (née Mexals) was  first documented  by Bitdefender in July 2021, uncovering the actor's use of a Go-based SSH brute-forcer tool called Diicot Brute to breach Linux hosts as part of a cryptojacking campaign. Then earlier this April, Akamai  disclosed  what it described as a "resurgence" of the 2021 activity that's believed to have started around October 2022, netting the actor about $10,000 in illicit profits. "The attackers use a long ch

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Spanish-speaking users in Latin America have been at the receiving end of a new botnet malware dubbed  Horabot  since at least November 2020. "Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim's Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts' email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim's mailbox," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad  said . The botnet program also delivers a Windows-based financial trojan and a spam tool to harvest online banking credentials as well as compromise Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! webmail accounts to blast spam emails. The cybersecurity firm said a majority of the infections are located in Mexico, with limited victims identified in Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, and Panama. The threat actor behind the campaign is believed to be in Brazil. Targeted users of the ongoing campaign primarily span accounting, construction and engineering, wholesale distributio

A nascent botnet called  Andoryu  has been found to  exploit  a now-patched critical security flaw in the Ruckus Wireless Admin panel to break into vulnerable devices. The  flaw , tracked as  CVE-2023-25717  (CVSS score: 9.8), stems from improper handling of HTTP requests, leading to unauthenticated remote code execution and a complete compromise of wireless Access Point (AP) equipment. Andoryu was  first documented  by Chinese cybersecurity firm QiAnXin earlier this February, detailing its ability to communicate with command-and-control (C2) servers using the  SOCKS5 protocol . While the malware is known to weaponize remote code execution flaws in GitLab ( CVE-2021-22205 ) and Lilin DVR for propagation, the addition of CVE-2023-25717 shows that Andoryu is actively expanding its exploit arsenal to ensnare more devices into the botnet. "It contains DDoS attack modules for different protocols and communicates with its command-and-control server using SOCKS5 proxies," Fort

Google on Wednesday said it obtained a temporary court order in the U.S. to disrupt the distribution of a Windows-based information-stealing malware called  CryptBot  and "decelerate" its growth. The tech giant's Mike Trinh and Pierre-Marc Bureau  said  the efforts are part of steps it takes to "not only hold criminal operators of malware accountable, but also those who profit from its distribution." CryptBot is estimated to have infected over 670,000 computers in 2022 with the goal of stealing sensitive data such as authentication credentials, social media account logins, and cryptocurrency wallets from users of Google Chrome. The harvested data is then exfiltrated to the threat actors, who then sell the data to other attackers for use in data breach campaigns. CryptBot was  first discovered  in the wild in December 2019. The malware has been traditionally delivered via maliciously modified versions of legitimate and popular software packages such as Goog

Microsoft has confirmed that the  active exploitation of PaperCut servers  is linked to attacks that are designed to deliver Cl0p and LockBit ransomware families. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is attributing a subset of the intrusions to a financially motivated actor it tracks under the name  Lace Tempest  (formerly DEV-0950), which overlaps with other hacking groups like FIN11, TA505, and Evil Corp. "In observed attacks, Lace Tempest ran multiple PowerShell commands to deliver a TrueBot DLL, which connected to a C2 server, attempted to steal LSASS credentials, and injected the  TrueBot payload  into the conhost.exe service," Microsoft  said  in a series of tweets. The next phase of the attack entailed the deployment of Cobalt Strike Beacon implant to conduct reconnaissance, move laterally across the network using WMI, and exfiltrate files of interest via the file-sharing service MegaSync. Lace Tempest is a Cl0p ransomware affiliate that's said to hav

A novel credential-stealing malware called  Zaraza bot  is being offered for sale on Telegram while also using the  popular   messaging service  as a command-and-control (C2). "Zaraza bot targets a large number of web browsers and is being actively distributed on a Russian Telegram hacker channel popular with threat actors," cybersecurity company Uptycs  said  in a report published last week. "Once the malware infects a victim's computer, it retrieves sensitive data and sends it to a Telegram server where the attackers can access it immediately." A 64-bit binary file compiled using C#, Zaraza bot is designed to target as many as 38 different web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, AVG Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Yandex. It's also equipped to capture screenshots of the active window. It's the latest example of malware that's capable of capturing login credentials associated with online bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets

Critical security flaws in Cacti, Realtek, and IBM Aspera Faspex are being exploited by various threat actors in hacks targeting unpatched systems. This entails the abuse of  CVE-2022-46169  (CVSS score: 9.8) and  CVE-2021-35394  (CVSS score: 9.8) to deliver  MooBot  and  ShellBot  (aka PerlBot), Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report published this week. CVE-2022-46169  relates to a critical authentication bypass and command injection flaw in Cacti servers that allows an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code.  CVE-2021-35394  also concerns an arbitrary command injection vulnerability impacting the Realtek Jungle SDK that was patched in 2021. While the latter has been previously exploited to distribute botnets like Mirai, Gafgyt, Mozi, and RedGoBot, the development marks the first time it has been utilized to deploy MooBot, a Mirai variant known to be active since 2019. The Cacti flaw, besides being leveraged for MooBot attacks, has also been observed serving ShellB

A new Golang-based botnet dubbed  HinataBot  has been observed to leverage known flaws to compromise routers and servers and use them to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The malware binaries appear to have been named by the malware author after a character from the popular anime series, Naruto, with file name structures such as 'Hinata-<OS>-<Architecture>,'" Akamai  said  in a technical report. Among the methods used to distribute the malware are the exploitation of exposed Hadoop YARN servers and security flaws in Realtek SDK devices ( CVE-2014-8361 )and Huawei HG532 routers ( CVE-2017-17215 , CVSS score: 8.8). Unpatched vulnerabilities and weak credentials have been a low-hanging fruit for attackers, representing an easy, well-documented entry point that does not require sophisticated social engineering tactics or other methods. The threat actors behind HinataBot are said to have been active since at least December 2022, with the

A new Golang-based malware dubbed  GoBruteforcer  has been found targeting web servers running phpMyAdmin, MySQL, FTP, and Postgres to corral the devices into a botnet. "GoBruteforcer chose a Classless Inter-Domain Routing ( CIDR ) block for scanning the network during the attack, and it targeted all IP addresses within that CIDR range," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers  said . "The threat actor chose CIDR block scanning as a way to get access to a wide range of target hosts on different IPs within a network instead of using a single IP address as a target." GoBruteforcer is mainly designed to single out Unix-like platforms running x86, x64 and ARM architectures, with  the malware attempting to obtain access via a brute-force attack using a list of credentials hard-coded into the binary. If the attack proves to be successful, an internet relay chat ( IRC ) bot is deployed on the victim server to establish communications with an actor-controlled server.

An updated version of a botnet malware called  Prometei  has infected more than 10,000 systems worldwide since November 2022. The infections are both geographically indiscriminate and opportunistic, with a majority of the victims reported in Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey. Prometei, first observed in 2016, is a modular botnet that features a large repertoire of components and several proliferation methods, some of which also include the  exploitation  of ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange Server flaws. It's also notable for avoiding striking Russia, suggesting that the threat actors behind the operation are likely based in the country. The cross-platform botnet's motivations are financial, primarily leveraging its pool of infected hosts to mine cryptocurrency and harvest credentials. The latest variant of Prometei (called v3) improves upon its existing features to challenge forensic analysis and further burrow its access on victim machines, Cisco Talos  said  in a report share

A sophisticated botnet known as MyloBot has compromised thousands of systems, with most of them located in India, the U.S., Indonesia, and Iran. That's according to new findings from BitSight, which  said  it's "currently seeing more than 50,000 unique infected systems every day," down from a high of 250,000 unique hosts in 2020. Furthermore, an analysis of MyloBot's infrastructure has found connections to a residential proxy service called BHProxies, indicating that the compromised machines are being used by the latter. MyloBot, which emerged on the threat landscape in 2017, was  first documented  by Deep Instinct in 2018, calling out its anti-analysis techniques and its ability to function as a downloader. "What makes MyloBot dangerous is its ability to download and execute any type of payload after it infects a host," Lumen's Black Lotus Labs  said  in November 2018. "This means at any time it could download any other type of malware th

At least 1,200 Redis database servers worldwide have been corralled into a botnet using an "elusive and severe threat" dubbed HeadCrab since early September 2021. "This advanced threat actor utilizes a state-of-the-art, custom-made malware that is undetectable by agentless and traditional anti-virus solutions to compromise a large number of Redis servers," Aqua security researcher Asaf Eitani  said  in a Wednesday report. A significant concentration of infections has been recorded in China, Malaysia, India, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. to date. The origins of the threat actor are presently unknown. The findings come two months after the cloud security firm shed light on a Go-based malware codenamed  Redigo  that has been found compromising Redis servers. The attack is designed to target Redis servers that are exposed to the internet, followed by issuing a  SLAVEOF command  from another Redis server that's already under the adversary's control. In

The  Zerobot  DDoS botnet has received substantial updates that expand on its ability to target more internet-connected devices and scale its network. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the ongoing threat under the moniker DEV-1061, its designation for unknown, emerging, or developing activity clusters. Zerobot,  first documented  by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs earlier this month, is a Go-based malware that propagates through vulnerabilities in web applications and IoT devices like firewalls, routers, and cameras. "The most recent distribution of Zerobot includes additional capabilities, such as exploiting vulnerabilities in Apache and Apache Spark ( CVE-2021-42013  and  CVE-2022-33891  respectively), and new DDoS attack capabilities," Microsoft researchers  said . Also called ZeroStresser by its operators, the malware is offered as a DDoS-for-hire service to other criminal actors, with the botnet advertised for sale on various social media networks.

An ongoing analysis of the  KmsdBot  botnet has raised the possibility that it's a DDoS-for-hire service offered to other threat actors. This is based on the different industries and geographies that were attacked, web infrastructure company Akamai said. Among the notable targets included  FiveM  and  RedM , which are game modifications for Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, as well as luxury brands and security firms. KmsdBot is a  Go-based malware  that leverages SSH to infect systems and carry out activities like cryptocurrency mining and launch commands using TCP and UDP to mount distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. However, a lack of an error-checking mechanism in the malware source code caused the criminal operators to inadvertently  crash their own botnet  last month. "Based on observed IPs and domains, the majority of the victims are located in Asia, North America, and Europe," Akamai researchers Larry W. Cashdollar and Allen West  said .

The operators of the Glupteba botnet resurfaced in June 2022 as part of a renewed and "upscaled" campaign, months after Google disrupted the malicious activity. The ongoing attack is suggestive of the malware's resilience in the face of takedowns, cybersecurity company Nozomi Networks said in a write-up. "In addition, there was a tenfold increase in TOR hidden services being used as C2 servers since the 2021 campaign," it  noted . The malware, which is distributed through fraudulent ads or software cracks, is also equipped to retrieve additional payloads that enable it to steal credentials, mine cryptocurrencies, and expand its reach by exploiting vulnerabilities in IoT devices from  MikroTik  and  Netgear . It's also an instance of an unusual malware that leverages blockchain as a mechanism for command-and-control (C2)  since at least 2019 , rendering its infrastructure resistant to takedown efforts as in the case of a traditional server. Specifically

NOTE: In this blog, Zerobot refers to a botnet that spreads primarily through IoT and web application vulnerabilities. It is not associated with the chatbot ZeroBot.ai. A novel Go-based botnet called  Zerobot  has been observed in the wild proliferating by taking advantage of nearly two dozen security vulnerabilities in the internet of things (IoT) devices and other software. The botnet "contains several modules, including self-replication, attacks for different protocols, and self-propagation," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said . "It also communicates with its command-and-control server using the WebSocket protocol." The campaign, which is said to have commenced after November 18, 2022, primarily singles out Windows and Linux operating systems to gain control of vulnerable devices. Zerobot gets its name from a propagation script that's used to retrieve the malicious payload after gaining access to a host depending on its microarchitecture