We noticed a sudden increase in hack tool installation attempts from various industries in China, Taiwan, Italy and Hong Kong. We found a trojan combining RADMIN and MIMIKATZ to drop a Monero miner by exploiting MS17-010 for propagation, likely taking advantage of the Lunar New Year holidays.
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We spotted two variants of activities from hacking group Outlaw. The script used in the first version of its bot has two functionalities: the miner and Haiduc-based dropper. The second variant of the code, distributed by the bot, was mainly designed to brute force and further exploit the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol and cloud administration cPanel in order to escalate the privileges.
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We were able to observe a series of network attacks exploiting CVE-2018-7602, a security flaw in the Drupal content management framework. For now, these attacks aim to turn affected systems into Monero-mining bots. Of note are its ways of hiding behind the Tor network to elude detection and how it checks the affected system first before infecting it with a cryptocurrency-mining malware. While these attacks currently deliver resource-stealing and system performance-slowing malware, the vulnerability can be used as a doorway to other threats.
Read More An exploit kit such as Rig usually starts off with a threat actor compromising a website to inject a malicious script/code that eventually redirects would-be victims to the exploit kit’s landing page. Sometime around February to March last year, however, we saw Rig’s Seamless campaign adding another layer or gate before the actual landing page.
Along with updates in code, we also observed Rig integrating a cryptocurrency-mining malware as its final payload. Based on the latest activities we’ve observed from Rig, they’re now also exploiting CVE-2018-8174, a remote code execution vulnerability patched in May and reported to be actively exploited. The exploit also appears to be from a recently disclosed proof of concept. The security flaw affects systems running Windows 7 and later operating systems, and the exploit works through Internet Explorer (IE) and Microsoft Office documents that use the vulnerable script engine.
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We came across a new version of a cryptocurrency-mining RETADUP worm (detected by Trend Micro as WORM_RETADUP.G) through feedback from our managed detection and response-related monitoring. This new variant is coded in AutoHotKey, an open-source scripting language used in Windows for creating hotkeys (i.e., keyboard shortcuts, macros, software automation). AutoHotKey is relatively similar to the script automation utility AutoIt, from which RETADUP’s earlier variants were based on and used for both cybercrime and cyberespionage.
We identified this threat via an endpoint — from an organization in the public sector — that had related malware artifacts (as RETADUP was promptly blocked). Further analyzing and correlating them based on their C&C protocol and our own RETADUP detections, we found that they were similar to other samples we sourced. These indicate that, at least for now, RETADUP’s operators — despite their history in deploying their malware in targeted attacks — are focusing on cybercriminal cryptocurrency mining.
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