Risk actors are exploiting a extreme safety flaw in PHP to ship cryptocurrency miners and distant entry trojans (RATs) like Quasar RAT.
The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-4577, refers to an argument injection vulnerability in PHP affecting Home windows-based techniques operating in CGI mode that might enable distant attackers to run arbitrary code.
Cybersecurity firm Bitdefender stated it has noticed a surge in exploitation makes an attempt towards CVE-2024-4577 since late final 12 months, with a major focus reported in Taiwan (54.65%), Hong Kong (27.06%), Brazil (16.39%), Japan (1.57%), and India (0.33%).
About 15% of the detected exploitation makes an attempt contain fundamental vulnerability checks utilizing instructions like “whoami” and “echo <test_string>.” One other 15% revolve round instructions used for system reconnaissance, corresponding to course of enumeration, community discovery, person and area data, and system metadata gathering.
Martin Zugec, technical options director at Bitdefender, famous that no less than roughly 5% of the detected assaults culminated within the deployment of the XMRig cryptocurrency miner.
“One other smaller marketing campaign concerned the deployment of Nicehash miners, a platform that enables customers to promote computing energy for cryptocurrency,” Zugec added. “The miner course of was disguised as a reliable utility, corresponding to javawindows.exe, to evade detection.”
Different assaults have been discovered to weaponize the shortcoming of delivering distant entry instruments just like the open-source Quasar RAT, in addition to execute malicious Home windows installer (MSI) recordsdata hosted on distant servers utilizing cmd.exe.
In maybe one thing of a curious twist, the Romanian firm stated it additionally noticed makes an attempt to switch firewall configurations on weak servers with an purpose to dam entry to recognized malicious IPs related to the exploit.
This uncommon habits has raised the chance that rival cryptojacking teams are competing for management over vulnerable sources and stopping them from focusing on these underneath their management a second time. It is also per historic observations about how cryptjacking assaults are recognized to terminate rival miner processes previous to deploying their very own payloads.
The event comes shortly after Cisco Talos revealed particulars of a marketing campaign weaponizing the PHP flaw in assaults focusing on Japanese organizations for the reason that begin of the 12 months.
Customers are suggested to replace their PHP installations to the newest model to safeguard towards potential threats.
“Since most campaigns have been utilizing LOTL instruments, organizations ought to contemplate limiting using instruments corresponding to PowerShell inside the atmosphere to solely privileged customers corresponding to directors,” Zugec stated.
