The notorious cryptojacking group often called TeamTNT seems to be readying for a brand new large-scale marketing campaign focusing on cloud-native environments for mining cryptocurrencies and renting out breached servers to third-parties.
“The group is currently targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy Sliver malware, a cyber worm, and cryptominers, using compromised servers and Docker Hub as the infrastructure to spread their malware,” Assaf Morag, director of risk intelligence at cloud safety agency Aqua, stated in a report printed Friday.
The assault exercise is as soon as once more a testomony to the risk actor’s persistence and its capacity to evolve its ways and mounting multi-stage assaults with the aim of compromising Docker environments and enlisting them right into a Docker Swarm.
Apart from utilizing Docker Hub to host and distribute their malicious payloads, TeamTNT has been noticed providing the victims’ computational energy to different events for illicit cryptocurrency mining, diversifying its monetization technique.
Rumblings of the assault marketing campaign emerged earlier this month when Datadog disclosed malicious makes an attempt to corral contaminated Docker situations right into a Docker Swarm, alluding it may very well be the work of TeamTNT, whereas additionally stopping in need of making a proper attribution. However the full extent of the operation hasn’t been clear, till now.
Morag advised The Hacker Information that Datadog “found the infrastructure in a very early stage” and that their discovery “forced the threat actor to change the campaign a bit.”
The assaults entail figuring out unauthenticated and uncovered Docker API endpoints utilizing masscan and ZGrab and utilizing them for cryptominer deployment and promoting the compromised infrastructure to others on a mining rental platform known as Mining Rig Leases, successfully offloading the job of getting to handle them themselves, an indication of the maturation of the illicit enterprise mannequin.
Particularly, that is carried out via an assault script that scans for Docker daemons on ports 2375, 2376, 4243, and 4244 throughout practically 16.7 million IP addresses. It subsequently deploys a container operating an Alpine Linux picture with malicious instructions.
The picture, retrieved from a compromised Docker Hub account (“nmlm99”) beneath their management, additionally executes an preliminary shell script named the Docker Gatling Gun (“TDGGinit.sh”) to launch post-exploitation actions.
One notable change noticed by Aqua is the shift away from the Tsunami backdoor to the open-source Sliver command-and-control (C2) framework for remotely commandeering the contaminated servers.
“Additionally, TeamTNT continues to use their established naming conventions, such as Chimaera, TDGG, and bioset (for C2 operations), which reinforces the idea that this is a classic TeamTNT campaign,” Morag stated.
“In this campaign TeamTNT is also using anondns (AnonDNS or Anonymous DNS is a concept or service designed to provide anonymity and privacy when resolving DNS queries), in order to point to their web server.”
The findings come as Development Micro make clear a brand new marketing campaign that concerned a focused brute-force assault towards an unnamed buyer to ship the Prometei crypto mining botnet.
“Prometei spreads in the system by exploiting vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Server Message Block (SMB),” the corporate stated, highlighting the risk actor’s efforts on organising persistence, evading safety instruments, and gaining deeper entry to a corporation’s community via credential dumping and lateral motion.
“The affected machines connect to a mining pool server which can be used to mine cryptocurrencies (Monero) on compromised machines without the victim’s knowledge.”
