‘Lucifer’ Botnet Turns Up the Warmth on Apache Hadoop Servers

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A menace actor is focusing on organizations working Apache Hadoop and Apache Druid huge knowledge applied sciences with a brand new model of the Lucifer botnet, a identified malware device that mixes cryptojacking and distributed denial of service (DDoS) capabilities.The marketing campaign is a departure for the botnet, and an evaluation this week from Aqua Nautilus means that its operators are testing new an infection routines as a precursor to a broader marketing campaign.Lucifer is self-propagating malware that researchers at Palo Alto Networks first reported in Might 2020. On the time, the corporate described the menace as harmful hybrid malware that an attacker might use to allow DDoS assaults, or for dropping XMRig for mining Monero cryptocurrency. Palo Alto stated it had noticed attackers additionally utilizing Lucifer to drop the NSA’s leaked EternalBlue, EternalRomance, and DoublePulsar malware and exploits heading in the right direction methods.”Lucifer is a brand new hybrid of cryptojacking and DDoS malware variant that leverages outdated vulnerabilities to unfold and carry out malicious actions on Home windows platforms,” Palo Alto had warned on the time.Now, it is again and focusing on Apache servers. Researchers from Aqua Nautilus who’ve been monitoring the marketing campaign stated in a weblog this week that they had counted greater than 3,000 distinctive assaults focusing on the corporate’s Apache Hadoop, Apache Druid, and Apache Flink honeypots in simply the final month alone.Lucifer’s 3 Distinctive Assault PhasesThe marketing campaign has been ongoing for at the very least six months, throughout which era the attackers have been making an attempt to take advantage of identified misconfigurations and vulnerabilities within the open supply platforms to ship their payload.The marketing campaign thus far has been comprised of three distinct phases, which the researchers stated is probably going a sign that the adversary is testing protection evasion strategies earlier than a full-scale assault.”The marketing campaign started focusing on our honeypots in July,” says Nitzan Yaakov, safety knowledge analyst at Aqua Nautilus. “Throughout our investigation, we noticed the attacker updating strategies and strategies to attain the principle aim of the assault — mining cryptocurrency.”Through the first stage of the brand new marketing campaign, Aqua researchers noticed the attackers scanning the Web for misconfigured Hadoop situations. After they detected a misconfigured Hadoop YARN (But One other Useful resource Negotiator) cluster useful resource administration and job scheduler know-how on Aqua’s honeypot, they focused that occasion for exploit exercise. The misconfigured occasion on Aqua’s honeypot needed to do with Hadoop YARN’s useful resource supervisor and gave the attackers a technique to execute arbitrary code on it through a specifically crafted HTTP request.The attackers exploited the misconfiguration to obtain Lucifer, execute it and retailer it to the Hadoop YARN occasion’s native listing. They then ensured the malware was executed on a scheduled foundation to make sure persistence. Aqua additionally noticed the attacker deleting the binary from the trail the place it was initially saved to attempt to evade detection.Within the second section of assaults, the menace actors as soon as once more focused misconfigurations within the Hadoop big-data stack to attempt to acquire preliminary entry. This time, nevertheless, as a substitute of dropping a single binary, the attackers dropped two on the compromised system — one which executed Lucifer and the opposite which apparently did nothing.Within the third section, the attacker switched techniques and, as a substitute of focusing on misconfigured Apache Hadoop situations, started in search of susceptible Apache Druid hosts as a substitute. Aqua’s model of the Apache Druid service on its honeypot was unpatched in opposition to CVE-2021-25646, a command injection vulnerability in sure variations of the high-performance analytics database. The vulnerability offers authenticated attackers a technique to execute user-defined JavaScript code on affected methods.The attacker exploited the flaw to inject a command for downloading two binaries and enabling them with learn, write, and execute permissions for all customers, Aqua stated. One of many binaries initiated the obtain of Lucifer, whereas the opposite executed the malware. On this section, the attacker’s determination to separate the downloading and execution of Lucifer between two binary information seems to have been an try to bypass detection mechanisms, the safety vendor famous.Tips on how to Keep away from a Hellish Cyberattack on Apache Huge DataAhead of a possible coming wave of assaults in opposition to Apache situations, enterprises ought to evaluation their footprints for frequent misconfigurations, and guarantee all patching is up-to-date.Past that, the researchers famous that “unknown threats might be recognized by scanning your environments with runtime detection and response options, which may detect distinctive conduct and alert about it,” and that “you will need to be cautious and conscious of current threats whereas utilizing open-source libraries. Each library and code needs to be downloaded from a verified distributor.”

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