10-Year-Old 'RUBYCARP' Romanian Hacker Group Surfaces with Botnet

A threat group of suspected Romanian origin called RUBYCARP has been observed maintaining a long-running botnet for carrying out crypto mining, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and phishing attacks. The group, believed to be active for at least 10 years, employs the botnet for financial gain, Sysdig said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Its primary method of operation

29-Year-Old Ukrainian Cryptojacking Kingpin Arrested for Exploiting Cloud Services

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

Cryptominers Targeting Misconfigured Apache Hadoop and Flink with Rootkit in New Attacks

Cybersecurity researchers have identified a new attack that exploits misconfigurations in Apache Hadoop and Flink to deploy cryptocurrency miners within targeted environments. "This attack is particularly intriguing due to the attacker's use of packers and rootkits to conceal the malware," Aqua security researchers Nitzan Yaakov and Assaf Morag said in an analysis published earlier

NoaBot: Latest Mirai-Based Botnet Targeting SSH Servers for Crypto Mining

A new Mirai-based botnet called NoaBot is being used by threat actors as part of a crypto mining campaign since the beginning of 2023. “The capabilities of the new botnet, NoaBot, include a wormable self-spreader and an SSH key backdoor to download and execute additional binaries or spread itself to new victims,” Akamai security researcher Stiv Kupchik said in a report shared with The

8220 Gang Exploiting Oracle WebLogic Server Vulnerability to Spread Malware

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

DarkGate and PikaBot Malware Resurrect QakBot's Tactics in New Phishing Attacks

Phishing campaigns delivering malware families such as DarkGate and PikaBot are following the same tactics previously used in attacks leveraging the now-defunct QakBot trojan. “These include hijacked email threads as the initial infection, URLs with unique patterns that limit user access, and an infection chain nearly identical to what we have seen with QakBot delivery,” Cofense said in a report

Researchers Uncover Undetectable Crypto Mining Technique on Azure Automation

Cybersecurity researchers have developed what's the first fully undetectable cloud-based cryptocurrency miner leveraging the Microsoft Azure Automation service without racking up any charges. Cybersecurity company SafeBreach said it discovered three different methods to run the miner, including one that can be executed on a victim's environment without attracting any attention. "While this

Cybercriminals Weaponizing Legitimate Advanced Installer Tool in Crypto-Mining Attacks

A legitimate Windows tool used for creating software packages called Advanced Installer is being abused by threat actors to drop cryptocurrency-mining malware on infected machines since at least November 2021. "The attacker uses Advanced Installer to package other legitimate software installers, such as Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk 3ds Max, and SketchUp Pro, with malicious scripts and uses

Agile Approach to Mass Cloud Credential Harvesting and Crypto Mining Sprints Ahead

Developers are not the only people who have adopted the agile methodology for their development processes. From 2023-06-15 to 2023-07-11, Permiso Security’s p0 Labs team identified and tracked an attacker developing and deploying eight (8) incremental iterations of their credential harvesting malware while continuing to develop infrastructure for an upcoming (spoiler: now launched) campaign

Malicious Campaigns Exploit Weak Kubernetes Clusters for Crypto Mining

Exposed Kubernetes (K8s) clusters are being exploited by malicious actors to deploy cryptocurrency miners and other backdoors. Cloud security firm Aqua, in a report shared with The Hacker News, said a majority of the clusters belonged to small to medium-sized organizations, with a smaller subset tied to bigger companies, spanning financial, aerospace, automotive, industrial, and security sectors

Indonesian Cybercriminals Exploit AWS for Profitable Crypto Mining Operations

A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker GUI-vil (pronounced Goo-ee-vil). "The group displays a preference for Graphical

Cryptocurrency Mining Campaign Hits Linux Users with Go-based CHAOS Malware

A cryptocurrency mining attack targeting the Linux operating system also involved the use of an open source remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed CHAOS. The threat, which was spotted by Trend Micro in November 2022, remains virtually unchanged in all other aspects, including when it comes to terminating competing malware, security software, and deploying the Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency miner. "The