crypto miner | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A threat actor, presumably from Tunisia, has been linked to a new campaign targeting exposed Jupyter Notebooks in a two-fold attempt to illicitly mine cryptocurrency and breach cloud environments. Dubbed  Qubitstrike  by Cado, the intrusion set utilizes Telegram API to exfiltrate cloud service provider credentials following a successful compromise. "The payloads for the Qubitstrike campaign are all hosted on codeberg.org – an alternative Git hosting platform, providing much of the same functionality as GitHub," security researchers Matt Muir and Nate Bill  said  in a Wednesday write-up. In the attack chain documented by the cloud security firm, publicly accessible Jupyter instances are breached to execute commands to retrieve a shell script (mi.sh) hosted on Codeberg. The shell script, which acts as the primary payload, is responsible for executing a cryptocurrency miner, establishing persistence by means of a cron job, inserting an attacker-controlled key to t...

A novel cloud-native cryptojacking operation has set its eyes on uncommon Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings such as AWS Amplify, AWS Fargate, and Amazon SageMaker to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. The malicious cyber activity has been codenamed  AMBERSQUID  by cloud and container security firm Sysdig. "The AMBERSQUID operation was able to exploit cloud services without triggering the AWS requirement for approval of more resources, as would be the case if they only spammed EC2 instances," Sysdig security researcher Alessandro Brucato said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Targeting multiple services also poses additional challenges, like incident response, since it requires finding and killing all miners in each exploited service." Sysdig said it discovered the campaign following an  analysis of 1.7 million images  on Docker Hub, attributing it with moderate confidence to Indonesian attackers based on the use of Indonesian language in scripts and use...

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Suspected Russian threat actors have been targeting Eastern European users in the crypto industry with fake job opportunities as bait to install information-stealing malware on compromised hosts. The attackers "use several highly obfuscated and under-development custom loaders in order to infect those involved in the cryptocurrency industry with Enigma stealer," Trend Micro researchers Aliakbar Zahravi and Peter Girnus  said  in a report this week. Enigma is said to be an altered version of Stealerium, an open source C#-based malware that acts as a stealer, clipper, and keylogger. The intricate infection journey starts with a rogue RAR archive file that's distributed via phishing or social media platforms. It contains two documents, one of which is a .TXT file that includes a set of sample interview questions related to cryptocurrency. The second file is a Microsoft Word document that, while serving as a decoy, is tasked with launching the first-stage Enigma loader, ...

A Turkish-speaking entity called Nitrokod has been attributed to an active cryptocurrency mining campaign that involves impersonating a desktop application for Google Translate to infect over 111,000 victims in 11 countries since 2019.  "The malicious tools can be used by anyone," Maya Horowitz, vice president of research at Check Point, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "They can be found by a simple web search, downloaded from a link, and installation is a simple double-click." The list of countries with victims includes the U.K., the U.S., Sri Lanka, Greece, Israel, Germany, Turkey, Cyprus, Australia, Mongolia, and Poland. The  campaign  entails serving malware through free software hosted on popular sites such as Softpedia and Uptodown. But in an interesting tactic, the malware puts off its execution for weeks and separates its malicious activity from the downloaded fake software to avoid detection. The installation of the infected program...

A relatively new crypto-mining malware that surfaced last year and infected thousands of Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) databases has now been linked to a small software development company based in Iran. The attribution was made possible due to an operational security oversight, said researchers from cybersecurity firm Sophos, that led to the company's name inadvertently making its way into the cryptominer code. First documented by Chinese tech giant Tencent last September,  MrbMiner  was found to target internet-facing MSSQL servers with the goal of installing a cryptominer, which hijacks the processing power of the systems to mine Monero and funnel them into accounts controlled by the attackers. The name "MrbMiner" comes after one of the domains used by the group to host their malicious mining software. "In many ways, MrbMiner's operations appear typical of most cryptominer attacks we've seen targeting internet-facing servers,"  said  Gabor Szappa...

Security researchers have discovered an interesting piece of malware that infects systems with either a cryptocurrency miner or ransomware, depending upon their configurations to decide which of the two schemes could be more profitable. While ransomware is a type of malware that locks your computer and prevents you from accessing the encrypted data until you pay a ransom to get the decryption key required to decrypt your files, cryptocurrency miners utilize infected system's CPU power to mine digital currencies . Both ransomware and cryptocurrency mining-based attacks have been the top threats so far this year and share many similarities such as both are non-sophisticated attacks, carried out for money against non-targeted users, and involve digital currency. However, since locking a computer for ransom doesn't always guarantee a payback in case victims have nothing essential to losing, in past months cybercriminals have shifted more towards fraudulent cryptocurrency ...