Our honeypot sensors, which are designed to emulate Secure Shell (SSH), Telnet, and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) services, recently detected a mining bot related to the IP address 192.158.228.46. The address has been seen to search for both SSH- and IoT-related ports, including 22, 2222, and 502. In this particular attack, however, the IP has landed on port 22, SSH service. The attack could be applicable to all servers and connected devices with a running SSH service.
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We observed a large spike in the number of devices scanning the internet for port 7001/TCP since April 27, 2018. Our analysis found that it’s increased activity was caused by cybercriminals engaging in cryptomining via exploiting CVE-2017-10271. The flaw is a patched Oracle WebLogic WLS-WSAT vulnerability that can allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on unpatched servers. This marks the second time attackers abused CVE-2017-10271 for cryptomining purposes this year. In February, the vulnerability was exploited to deliver 64-bit and 32-bit variants of an XMRig Monero miner.
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Crime follows the money, as the saying goes, and once again, cybercriminals have acted accordingly. The underground is flooded with so many offerings of cryptocurrency malware that it must be hard for the criminals themselves to determine which is best. This kind of malware, also known as cryptomalware, has a clear goal, which is to make money out of cryptocurrency transactions. This can be achieved through two different methods: stealing cryptocurrency and mining cryptocurrency on victims’ devices surreptitiously (without the victims noticing), a process also known as cryptojacking. In this post, we discuss how these two methods work, and see whether devices connected to the internet of things (IoT), which are relatively underpowered, are being targeted.
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Our Cyber Safety Solutions team identified a malicious Chrome extension we named FacexWorm, which uses a miscellany of techniques to target cryptocurrency trading platforms accessed on an affected browser and propagates via Facebook Messenger.
FacexWorm isn’t new. It was uncovered in August 2017, though its whys and hows were still unclear at the time. Last April 8, however, we noticed a spike in its activities that coincided with external reports of FacexWorm surfacing in Germany, Tunisia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Spain.
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As new trends and developments in the malicious mining of cryptocurrency emerge, a smart and sustainable way of detecting these types of threats is swiftly becoming a cybersecurity necessity. By using Trend Micro Locality Sensitive Hashing (TLSH), a machine learning hash that is capable of identifying similar files, we were able to group together similar cryptocurrency-mining samples gathered from the wild. By grouping together samples based on their behavior and file types, detection of similar or modified malware becomes possible.
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