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For this attack, the first indication something is wrong in the audited logs is an echo command piping a base64 encoded command into base64 for decoding then piping into bash. Across our users, this first command has a parent process of an application or service exposed to the internet and the command is run by the user account associated with that process. This indicates the application or service itself was exploited in order to run the commands.
While some of these accounts are specific to a customer, we also see common accounts like Ubuntu, Jenkins, and Hadoop being used.
It is worth taking a brief aside to talk about how this attacker uses scripts. In this case, they do nearly everything through base64 encoded scripts. This indicates that when each of them is base64 encoded, the first part of the encoding is the same every time. The use of the same command is particularly helpful when trying to tie attacks together across a large set of machines.
The scripts themselves are also interesting because we can see what the attacker intended to run. As defenders, it can be very valuable to look at attacker scripts whenever you can so you can see how they are trying to manipulate systems. For instance, this attacker uses a for loop to cycle through different possible domain names.
This type of insight gives defenders more data to pivot on during an investigation. We observed this attacker use over thirty different encoded scripts across a number of customers, but they boiled down to roughly a dozen basic scripts with small differences in executable names or download sites. They grep through the files. They then attempt to pass their initial encoded script into each host using both the root account and the account they compromised on their current host without a password.
Note, the xssh function appears before the call in the original script. In each case, after the initial foothold is gained, the attacker uses a similar set of Defense Evasion techniques. After they download their executable into that file, they modify the downloaded file for execution, run it, then delete the file from disk:.
Azure Security Center's threat protection enables you to detect and prevent threats across a wide variety of services from Infrastructure as a Service IaaS layer to Platform as a Service PaaS resources in Azure, such as IoT, App Service, and on-premises virtual machines. At Ignite we announced new threat protection capabilities to counter sophisticated threats on cloud platforms, including preview for threat protection for Azure Kubernetes Service AKS Support in Security Center and preview for vulnerability assessment for Azure Container Registry ACR images.
In this blog, we will describe a recent large-scale cryptocurrency mining attack against Kubernetes clusters that was recently discovered by Azure Security Center. This is one of the many examples Azure Security Center can help you protect your Kubernetes clusters from threats. In Azure Security Center, we regularly detect a wide range of mining activities that run inside containers. Usually, those activities are running inside vulnerable containers, such as web applications, with known vulnerabilities that are exploited. Recently, Azure Security Center detected a new crypto mining campaign that targets specifically Kubernetes environments.
What differs this attack from other crypto mining attacks is its scale: within only two hours a malicious container was deployed on tens of Kubernetes clusters. This image runs XMRig, a very popular open source Monero miner. The telemetries showed that container was deployed by a Kubernetes Deployment named kube-control. As can be shown in the Deployment configuration below, the Deployment, in this case, ensures that 10 replicas of the pod would run on each cluster:.
Bitcoin Mining Cluster Linux. 1. CGMiner [macOS/Windows/Linux] One of the most popular and best-rated software for mining Bitcoin is CGMiner. It's available. Cgminer is an open source ASIC/FPGA bitcoin miner developed for a range of platforms, including Windows, Linux and OSx. It consists of sophisticated.
Capable of generating uncapped dogecoins, it also uses Scrypt to drive the currency along. Given their nature, they are more secure from fraud and identity theft as cryptocurrencies cannot be counterfeited, and personal information is behind a cryptographic wall.
Unfortunately, the same apparent profitability, convenience, and pseudonymity of cryptocurrencies also made them ideal for cybercriminals, as ransomware operators showed. The increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies coincide with the incidences of malware that infect systems and devices, turning them into armies of cryptocurrency-mining machines. Cryptocurrency mining is a computationally intensive task that requires significant resources from dedicated processors, graphics cards, and other hardware.
While mining does generate money, there are many caveats. Cryptocurrencies are mined in blocks; in bitcoin, for instance, each time a certain number of hashes are solved, the number of bitcoins that can be awarded to the miner per block is halved.
Since the bitcoin network is designed to generate the cryptocurrency every 10 minutes, the difficulty of solving another hash is adjusted. And as mining power increases , the resource requirement for mining a new block piles up. Payouts are relatively small and eventually decrease every four years—in , the reward for mining a block was halved to Consequently, many join forces into pools to make mining more efficient.
Profit is divided between the group, depending on how much effort a miner exerted. Bad guys turn to using malware to skirt around these challenges.
Comparing Blockchain Technologies Multiple platforms exist for crypto-trading. If nothing happens, download Xcode and try again. How to Run Production Blockchain Applications in Containers was a year in which crypto-currencies hit the mainstream - mainly because of the…. I have a few strange processes, and they connect to cloud computers in France, Germany, and China and consuming CPU and sending data. A good alternative would be the cheaper Pentium chips like the G or G
To offset this, cryptocurrency-mining malware are designed to zombify botnets of computers to perform these tasks. Cryptocurrency-mining malware employ the same modus operandi as many other threats—from malware-toting spam emails and downloads from malicious URLs to junkware and potentially unwanted applications PUAs.
In January , a vulnerability in Yahoo! In , the threat crossed over to Android devices as Kagecoin , capable of mining bitcoin, litecoin, and dogecoin. The same was done to an old Java RAT that can mine litecoin. All exploit vulnerabilities.
These threats infected devices and machines and turned them into monero-mining botnets. Cryptocurrency-mining malware steal the resources of infected machines, significantly affecting their performance and increasing their wear and tear.