cryptojacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A 29-year-old Ukrainian national has been arrested in connection with running a "sophisticated cryptojacking scheme," netting them over $2 million (€1.8 million) in illicit profits. The person, described as the "mastermind" behind the operation, was apprehended in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on January 9 by the National Police of Ukraine with support from Europol and an unnamed cloud service provider following "months of intensive collaboration." "A cloud provider approached Europol back in January 2023 with information regarding compromised cloud user accounts of theirs," Europol  said , adding it shared the intelligence with the Ukrainian authorities. The Cyber Police of Ukraine, in a separate announcement, said the suspect "infected the servers of a well-known American company with a miner virus" at least since 2021, using custom brute-force tools to infiltrate 1,500 accounts of the firm. "Using the compromised accounts, the hacker gained access to the management ...

The threat actors associated with the  8220 Gang  have been observed exploiting a high-severity flaw in Oracle WebLogic Server to propagate their malware. The security shortcoming is  CVE-2020-14883  (CVSS score: 7.2), a remote code execution bug that could be exploited by authenticated attackers to take over susceptible servers. "This vulnerability allows remote authenticated attackers to execute code using a gadget chain and is commonly chained with  CVE-2020-14882  (an authentication bypass vulnerability also affecting Oracle Weblogic Server) or the use of leaked, stolen, or weak credentials," Imperva  said  in a report published last week. The 8220 Gang has a history of  leveraging known security flaws  to distribute cryptojacking malware. Earlier this May, the group was spotted utilizing another shortcoming in Oracle WebLogic servers (CVE-2017-3506, CVSS score: 7.4) to rope the devices into a crypto mining botnet. Recent attac...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

The recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting Apache ActiveMQ is being actively exploited by threat actors to distribute a new Go-based botnet called  GoTitan  as well as a .NET program known as  PrCtrl Rat  that's capable of remotely commandeering the infected hosts. The attacks involve the exploitation of a remote code execution bug (CVE-2023-46604, CVSS score: 10.0) that has been  weaponized  by various hacking crews, including the  Lazarus Group , in recent weeks. Following a successful breach, the threat actors have been observed to drop next-stage payloads from a remote server, one of which is GoTitan, a botnet designed for orchestrating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks via protocols such as HTTP, UDP, TCP, and TLS. "The attacker only provides binaries for x64 architectures, and the malware performs some checks before running," Fortinet Fortiguard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "It als...

Publicly-accessible Docker Engine API instances are being targeted by threat actors as part of a campaign designed to co-opt the machines into a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet dubbed  OracleIV . "Attackers are exploiting this misconfiguration to deliver a malicious Docker container, built from an image named 'oracleiv_latest' and containing Python malware compiled as an ELF executable," Cado researchers Nate Bill and Matt Muir  said . The malicious activity starts with attackers using an HTTP POST request to Docker's API to retrieve a malicious image from Docker Hub, which, in turn, runs a command to retrieve a shell script (oracle.sh) from a command-and-control (C&C) server. Oracleiv_latest  purports to be a MySQL image for docker and has been pulled 3,500 times to date. In a perhaps not-so-surprising twist, the image also includes additional instructions to fetch an XMRig miner and its configuration from the same server. That said, the clo...

A new ongoing campaign dubbed  EleKtra-Leak  has set its eyes on exposed Amazon Web Service (AWS) identity and access management (IAM) credentials within public GitHub repositories to facilitate cryptojacking activities. "As a result of this, the threat actor associated with the campaign was able to create multiple AWS Elastic Compute (EC2) instances that they used for wide-ranging and long-lasting cryptojacking operations," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers William Gamazo and Nathaniel Quist  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The operation, active since at least December 2020, is designed to mine Monero from as many as 474 unique Amazon EC2 instances between August 30 and October 6, 2023. A standout aspect of the attacks is the automated targeting of AWS IAM credentials within four minutes of their initial exposure on GitHub, indicating that threat actors are  programmatically cloning and scanning the repositories  to captur...

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 ...

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed an attack infrastructure that's being used as part of a "potentially massive campaign" against cloud-native environments. "This infrastructure is in early stages of testing and deployment, and is mainly consistent of an aggressive cloud worm, designed to deploy on exposed JupyterLab and Docker APIs in order to deploy  Tsunami malware , cloud credentials hijack, resource hijack, and further infestation of the worm," cloud security firm Aqua  said . The activity, dubbed  Silentbob  in reference to an AnonDNS domain set up by the attacker, is said to be linked to the infamous cryptojacking group tracked as  TeamTNT , citing overlaps in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). However, the involvement of an "advanced copycat" hasn't been ruled out. Aqua's investigation was prompted in the aftermath of an attack targeting its honeypot in early June 2023, leading to the discovery of four malicious cont...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered the first-ever illicit cryptocurrency mining campaign used to mint Dero since the start of February 2023. "The novel Dero cryptojacking operation concentrates on locating Kubernetes clusters with anonymous access enabled on a Kubernetes API and listening on non-standard ports accessible from the internet," CrowdStrike  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The development marks a notable shift from Monero, which is a prevalent cryptocurrency used in such campaigns. It's suspected it may have to do with the fact that  Dero  "offers larger rewards and provides the same or better anonymizing features." The attacks, attributed to an unknown financially motivated actor, commence with scanning for Kubernetes clusters with authentication set as  --anonymous-auth=true , which allows anonymous requests to the server, to drop initial payloads from three different U.S.-based IP addresses. This includes deploying ...

The infamous cryptocurrency miner group called 8220 Gang has been observed using a new crypter called ScrubCrypt to carry out cryptojacking operations. According to Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, the attack chain commences with the successful exploitation of susceptible Oracle WebLogic servers to download a PowerShell script that contains ScrubCrypt. Crypters are a type of software that can encrypt, obfuscate, and manipulate malware with the goal of evading detection by security programs. ScrubCrypt, which is advertised for sale by its author, comes with features to bypass Windows Defender protections as well as check for the presence of debugging and virtual machine environments. "ScrubCrypt is a crypter used to secure applications with a unique BAT packing method," security researcher Cara Lin  said  in a technical report. "The encrypted data at the top can be split into four parts using backslash '\.'" The crypter, in the final stage, decodes and loads...

Misconfigured Redis database servers are the target of a novel cryptojacking campaign that leverages a legitimate and open source command-line file transfer service to implement its attack. "Underpinning this campaign was the use of transfer[.]sh," Cado Security  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's possible that it's an attempt at evading detections based on other common code hosting domains (such as pastebin[.]com)." The cloud cybersecurity firm said the command line interactivity associated with transfer[.]sh has made it an ideal tool for hosting and delivering malicious payloads. The attack chain commences with targeting insecure Redis deployments, followed by registering a  cron job  that leads to arbitrary code execution when parsed by the scheduler. The job is designed to retrieve a payload hosted at transfer[.]sh. It's worth noting that  similar   attack mechanisms  have been employed by other threat actors like TeamTNT an...

The threat actors behind the  Kinsing  cryptojacking operation have been spotted exploiting misconfigured and exposed PostgreSQL servers to obtain initial access to Kubernetes environments. A second initial access vector technique entails the use of vulnerable images, Sunders Bruskin, security researcher at Microsoft Defender for Cloud,  said  in a report last week. Kinsing has a  storied history  of targeting  containerized environments , often leveraging misconfigured open Docker daemon API ports as well as abusing newly disclosed exploits to drop cryptocurrency mining software. The threat actor, in the past, has also been discovered  employing a rootkit  to hide its presence, in addition to terminating and uninstalling competing resource-intensive services and processes. Now according to Microsoft, misconfigurations in  PostgreSQL servers  have been co-opted by the Kinsing actor to gain an initial foothold, with the company...

A new cryptojacking campaign has been uncovered targeting vulnerable Docker and Kubernetes infrastructures as part of opportunistic attacks designed to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike dubbed the activity  Kiss-a-dog , with its command-and-control infrastructure overlapping with those associated with other groups like  TeamTNT , which are known to  strike   misconfigured  Docker and Kubernetes instances. The intrusions, spotted in September 2022, get their name from a domain named "kiss.a-dog[.]top" that's used to trigger a shell script payload on the compromised container using a Base64-encoded Python command. "The URL used in the payload is obscured with backslashes to defeat automated decoding and regex matching to retrieve the malicious domain," CrowdStrike researcher Manoj Ahuje  said  in a technical analysis. The attack chain subsequently attempts to escape the container and move laterally into the breached n...

Don't let the ongoing " crypto winter " lull you into a false sense of cybersecurity. Even as  cryptocurrencies lose value  — and some crypto companies  file for bankruptcy  —  cryptojacking  still poses an urgent threat to enterprises across industries, from financial services to healthcare to industry 4.0 and beyond.  Broadly speaking, cryptojacking is defined as the unauthorized and illegitimate use of an unwitting party's compute and/or server power by a malicious actor to mine cryptocurrencies. While everyone with an internet connection is technically vulnerable to cryptojacking, most attacks target enterprises with significant compute resources, especially those with an outsized number of third-party relationships. (More on that last part in a bit.) And if a malicious actor can breach your cybersecurity defenses for cryptojacking purposes, they can breach them for any number of nefarious reasons.  Under normal conditions, mining for crypt...

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...

In the span of a few years, cryptocurrencies have gone from laughingstock and novelty to a serious financial instrument, and a major sector in high-tech. The price of Bitcoin and Ethereum has gone from single dollars to thousands, and they're increasingly in the mainstream.  This is undoubtedly a positive development, as it opens new avenues for finance, transactions, tech developments, and more. Unfortunately, no innovation is without its dark side, and the crypto industry is no exception. A new webinar from XDR provider Cynet ( you can see it here ) dives deeper into this dark corner to explore the intersection of cybersecurity and cryptocurrency.  The first question is how, exactly, cryptocurrency creates security vulnerabilities for organizations. There's no single answer, and in many cases, the results are more indirect. This bears closer inspection, and the webinar, led by Cynet  CyOps Analyst  Ronen Ahdut, studies the different ways cryptocurrencies are use...

A threat group likely based in Romania and active since at least 2020 has been behind an active cryptojacking campaign targeting Linux-based machines with a previously undocumented SSH brute-forcer written in Golang. Dubbed " Diicot brute ," the password cracking tool is alleged to be distributed via a software-as-a-service model, with each threat actor furnishing their own unique API keys to facilitate the intrusions, Bitdefender researchers said in a report published last week. While the goal of the campaign is to deploy Monero mining malware by remotely compromising the devices via brute-force attacks, the researchers connected the gang to at least two  DDoS  botnets, including a  Demonbot  variant called chernobyl and a Perl  IRC bot , with the XMRig mining payload hosted on a domain named mexalz[.]us since February 2021. The Romanian cybersecurity technology company said it began its investigation into the group's hostile online activities in May 2021...

Former Amazon employee Paige Thompson , who was arrested last month in relation to the Capital One data breach , has been accused of hacking not only the U.S. credit card issuer, but also more than 30 other companies. An indictment unsealed on Wednesday revealed that Thompson not just stole data from misconfigured servers hosted with a cloud-computing company, but also used the computing power of hacked servers to mine for cryptocurrency, a practice commonly known as " Cryptojacking ." Thompson, known online as "erratic," was arrested by the FBI on July 29 concerning a massive breach in Capital One Financial Corp that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants in the United States and 6 million in Canada. The stolen data included approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers linked to United States customers, and 1 million Social Insurance numbers belonged to Canadian citizens, along wit...

Security researchers have been warning about a new malicious campaign that leverages an alternative scheme to mine cryptocurrencies without directly injecting the infamous CoinHive JavaScript into thousands of hacked websites. Coinhive is a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed JavaScript code that utilizes their website visitors' CPUs power in order to mine the Monero cryptocurrency for monetization. However, since its inception, mid-2017, cybercriminals have been abusing the service to illegally make money by injecting their own version of CoinHive JavaScript code to a large number of hacked websites, eventually tricking their millions of visitors into unknowingly mine Monero coins. Since a lot of web application security firms and antivirus companies have now updated their products to detect unauthorized injection of CoinHive JavaScript, cybercriminals have now started abusing a different service from CoinHive to achieve the same. Hackers ...

Hundreds of thousands of websites running on the Drupal CMS—including those of major educational institutions and government organizations around the world—have been found vulnerable to a highly critical flaw for which security patches were released almost two months ago. Security researcher Troy Mursch scanned the whole Internet and found  over 115,000 Drupal websites are still vulnerable to the Drupalgeddon2 flaw despite repetitive warnings. Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) is a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability discovered late March in Drupal CMS software (versions < 7.58 / 8.x < 8.3.9 / 8.4.x < 8.4.6 / 8.5.x < 8.5.1) that could allow attackers to completely take over vulnerable websites. For those unaware, Drupalgeddon2 allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on default or standard Drupal installations under the privileges of the user. Since Drupalgeddon2 had much potential to derive attention of motivated att...

In an effort to prevent cryptojacking by extensions that maliciously mine digital currencies without users' awareness, Google has implemented a new Web Store policy that bans any Chrome extension submitted to the Web Store that mines cryptocurrency. Over the past few months, we have seen a sudden rise in malicious extensions that appear to offer useful functionality, while embedding hidden cryptocurrency mining scripts that run in the background without the user's knowledge. Last month, cryptocurrency miners were even found in a Russian nuclear weapons lab and on thousands of government websites . In January, cryptocurrency mining malware also infected more than half-million PCs . Until now, only those cryptocurrency mining extensions were allowed on the Chrome Web Store that are solely intended for mining, and explicitly informed users about its working and revenue model. If the company finds any mining extension developers submitted was not in compliance and secre...