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US Washington
Crypto Currency Crypto-jacking Cyber Attacks Dos Attacks US Washington

Cryptojacking Spree: Targeting Washington State Educational Institutions

 

According to a new advisory released by Palo Alto Network's Unit 42 team, recently, cryptojacking incidents have taken place against educational institutions in Washington State. Threat actors are targeting educational institutions in the United States intending to compromise their networks and mine cryptocurrency covertly. 

Otherwise known as cryptojacking attacks, this is a form of cyberattack in which attackers use deception tactics to install cryptocurrency mining components that leech off of computational power without being noticed or detected. 

On February 16, cybersecurity researchers discovered the first attack, which consisted of a malicious HTTP request sent to a domain owned by an educational institution. Security teams initially mistook it for a trivial command injection flaw, but it turned out to be a command for a web shell backdoor that attackers used to gain access to the institution's network. 

In this form of attack, attackers use various types of miner software to try to generate cryptocurrencies such as Monero, Litecoin, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Attackers typically compromise a large number of systems to make the attacks lucrative and bring in more cryptocurrency. 

The researchers say that a UPX-packed cpuminer -- used to mine LTC and BTC -- has been delivered by way of malicious traffic. 

If deployment is successful, the backdoor is then able to call and execute the crypto mining payload. Besides, the malware will download a mini shell that pretends to be a wp-load.php file. "Since the mini shell is not moved elsewhere, we speculate that the current directory of the mini shell, as well as the backdoor, is a web directory exposed to the internet," the report states. 

Cryptocurrency mined on infected systems is sent to two wallets owned by the operators (1,2). In two other incidents, there were some differences when it came to user agent strings, pass values, and algorithms, but the general attack method remained the same. 

"The malicious request [...] exhibits several similarities," Unit 42 noted. "It's the same attack pattern delivering the same cpuminer payload against the same industry (education), suggesting it's likely the same perpetrator behind the cryptojacking operation."

An analysis of K-12 schools across the United States revealed in March that 2020 is a "record-breaking" year for cybersecurity incidents. Over 400 incidents were reported in the study, including ransomware, phishing attempts, website defacement, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
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worm
Crypto-jacking malware pro-ocean Rocke group worm

Rocke Group’s Pro Ocean Crypto-jacking Malware now Comes with Worm Feature

 

The Rocke Group's used cloud-targeted malware for carrying out crypto-jacking attacks for Monero that was documented in 2019 by Unit 42 researchers. Since then, the malware has been present in cybersecurity firms, which hindered the crypto-jacking activity of the Rocke Community. The threat actors behind the attack have reportedly updated the malware as researchers discovered a modified malware version used by the Rocke Community, a cyber-crime gang that attacks crypto-jack cloud infrastructure. 

The malware is known as "Pro Ocean," first detected in 2019, and now includes "worm" features and the detection-evasion features of rootkits. 

For cloud apps, Pro-Ocean utilizes well-known vulnerabilities Pro-Ocean attacked Apache ActiveMQ, Oracle WebLogic (CVE-2017-10271), and Redis in their study. If the malware is built-in Tencent Cloud or Alibaba Cloud, one can disable tracking agents using the same code of the previous malware to prevent detection. If the malware is installed, it destroys any operation that heavily uses the Kernel to use 100% of the CPU and Monero effectively. 

“This malware is an example that demonstrates that cloud providers’ agent-based security solutions may not be enough to prevent evasive malware targeted at public cloud infrastructure,” said Aviv Sasson. “As we saw, this sample can delete some cloud providers’ agents and evade their detection,” Sasson further added. 

The malware is comprised of four components: a rootkit package, which installs a rootkit and many other malice utilities, an XMRig mining module; a Watchdog module with two Bash scripts (to see whether the malware runs a strong CPU scan and some process). 

The latter “worm” feature is a recent Pro-Ocean addition. The ransomware now reverts to the public IP address of the victim's computer with a Python infection script. This is achieved by using an online service, which scopes IP addresses for different web servers with an "ident.me" address. The script then attempts in the same 16-Bit subnet to corrupt all computers (e.g. 10.0.X.X). The Pro-Ocean malware has also added new rootkit capabilities that cloak its malicious activity. 

“It does this by blindly executing public exploits one after the other in the hope of finding unpatched software it can exploit,” said Sasson. Researchers said that they believe, Rocke Group will be constantly modifying its malware, particularly as the cloud expands as a lucrative target for attackers.
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Ransomware
Cloud Security Crypto-jacking Cyber Criminals Cyber Security India Ransomware

Indian Organizations Suffer the Most in Public Cloud Security Incidents



In a survey of 26 countries for public Cloud security incidents, India emerges as the nation which endured the hardest hits the previous year with 93 percent of the nation's organizations encountering the problem.

The survey included more than 3,500 IT managers across 26 nations in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Center East, and Africa that currently host data and workloads at hand in the Public Cloud.

The cybersecurity incidents that Indian organizations suffered most included ransomware (53 percent) and other malware (49 percent), exposed data (49 percent), compromised accounts (48 percent), and cryptojacking (36 percent), said the report titled "The State of Cloud Security 2020" by cybersecurity company Sophos.

While Europeans seem to have endured the least level of security incidents in the Cloud, an indicator that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are assisting with protecting organizations from being undermined.

However, India still hasn't enforced a data protection law.

Chester Wisniewski, Principal Research Scientist at Sophos said in a statement, "Ransomware, not surprisingly, is one of the most widely reported cybercrimes in the public Cloud."

 "The recent increase in remote working provides extra motivation to disable Cloud infrastructure that is being relied on more than ever, so it's worrisome that many organizations still don't understand their responsibility in securing Cloud data and workloads," Wisniewski added later.

"Cloud security is a shared responsibility, and organizations need to carefully manage and monitor Cloud environments in order to stay one step ahead of determined attackers."

According to the report, more than 55 percent of Indian organizations and businesses revealed that cybercriminals obtained access through the stolen Cloud provider account credentials.

Regardless of this, only 29 percent said managing access to Cloud accounts is a top area of concern. Albeit 'accidental exposure' keeps on plaguing organizations, with misconfigurations exploited in 44 percent of reported attacks on Indian organizations.

With 76 percent of organizations utilizing the Public Cloud, detection and response are driving the Cloud security concern for IT managers in India while data security still stays as a top concern across the world for organizations.

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Security
Crypto-jacking Cyber Crime Honeypot Industrial control system Security

Cyber Attack Alert! A Fake Factory Network Attacked With RAT, Ransomware, Malware and So On!



Researchers simulated a real-looking “Industrial prototyping” organization with fake employees, PLCs, and websites to study the types of cyber-attacks that commonly on such networks.

The elaborately fake organization’s website and the network worked on a highly advanced interactive “honeypot” network that worked extensively on attracting the attention of potential hackers.

The plan was to create such a legitimate-looking network that no one could even doubt it's being phony and to accumulate serious information related to cyber-threats and attacks to study and analyze them.

Behind researching these threats and attack mechanisms the motive was to dig out the threats that the “Industrial control system” (ICS) sector faces today.

Per sources, the sham company specifically let some ports of its network be susceptible to attack and Voila! It got hit with the most cliché of attacks that any IT network faces, including, Ransomware, Malware, Remote Access Trojans (RAT), Crypto-jacking, Online fraud and the “botnet-style” malware which hit the network’s robotic workstation.

A couple of the attackers went as far as shutting the factory via the HMI, locking the screen and opening the “log view of the robot’s optical eye”.
While one of the few attackers of the more mischievous inclinations worked on tactics like circumventing the robotics system to shut the HMI application and ultimately powering down the entire system, the others started the company network back and shut the bogus conveyor belt and then shut the network back again.

Per sources, the fake factory network was constructed of real ICS hardware and an amalgamation of physical hosts and virtual devices, mainly a Siemens S7-1200 PLC, an Omron CP1L PLC and two Allen-Bradley Micrologix 1100 PLCs.

The researchers as bait also used the common exposed passwords on the internet for the network’s administrative security, which happens to be a very basic mistake in the ICS sector.

The PLCs were used to imitate real processes like controlling the burner, the conveyor belt and palletizer for piling pallets using robotic arms. The plant network had three VMs including an engineering workstation for programming, a robotics workstation and HMI for controlling the factory.

Allegedly, per reports, later on, the fake network also opened up Remote Desktop Protocol, EtherNet/IP, and Virtual Network Connection ports to lure in more attackers.

Another attack that the researchers found out which deeply exhausted the server’s capacity, was for crypto-currency mining unlike what they thought it to be.

Per reports, the network was also attacked with ransomware called “Crysis”, which kept the network down for around four days while negotiating which led to HMI being locked down and loss of visibility into the plant operations.

If only the network were real, this ransomware would have wreaked major havoc owing it to 4 entire days of no production. This clearly reflects the kind of jeopardy the ICS sector could face.

One of the researchers pretending to be a worker at the fake company emailed the attackers to return their files and also mentioned that how they were working for a very important client and wanted to immediately run the production back.

The ransom stopped at $6,000 in email-exchange which didn’t need to be paid given that they already had backups and therefore were able to re-construct their systems. Following this little incident, another ransomware which goes by the name of “Phobos” tried to binge on the network.

And then came the attacker with quite a sense of humor. With a data destruction attack disguised as ransomware, the attacker renamed the network’s ABB Robotics folder. And when they didn’t agree to pay the ransom the attacker wrote a script that made browsers to porn sites appear whenever the network was started.

Hence, pretty evidently, in addition to never letting VNCs open without passcodes and reusing passwords across different systems, the researchers say, that this fake “Network” had everything that must NOT be done to keep the ICS sector safe and secure.

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