Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a malware marketing campaign that is focusing on Docker environments with a beforehand undocumented method to mine cryptocurrency.
The exercise cluster, per Darktrace and Cado Safety, represents a shift from different cryptojacking campaigns that instantly deploy miners like XMRig to illicitly revenue off the compute sources.
This entails deploying a malware pressure that connects to a nascent Web3 service known as Teneo, a decentralized bodily infrastructure community (DePIN) that enables customers to monetize public social media knowledge by operating a Group Node in trade for rewards known as Teneo Factors, which might be transformed into $TENEO Tokens.
The node primarily capabilities as a distributed social media scraper to extract posts from Fb, X, Reddit, and TikTok.
An evaluation of artifacts gathered from its honeypots has revealed that the assault begins with a request to launch a container picture “kazutod/tene:ten” from the Docker Hub registry. The picture was uploaded two months in the past and has been downloaded 325 occasions so far.
The container picture is designed to run an embedded Python script that is closely obfuscated and requires 63 iterations to unpack the precise code, which units up a connection to teneo[.]professional.
“The malware script merely connects to the WebSocket and sends keep-alive pings with a purpose to achieve extra factors from Teneo and doesn’t do any precise scraping,” Darktrace mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker Information. “Based mostly on the web site, many of the rewards are gated behind the variety of heartbeats carried out, which is probably going why this works.”
The marketing campaign is paying homage to one other malicious menace exercise cluster that is identified to contaminate misconfigured Docker situations with the 9Hits Viewer software program with a purpose to generate site visitors to sure websites in trade for acquiring credit.
The intrusion set can be much like different bandwidth-sharing schemes like proxyjacking that contain downloading a particular software program to share unused web sources for some form of monetary incentive.
“Usually, conventional cryptojacking assaults depend on utilizing XMRig to instantly mine cryptocurrency, nonetheless as XMRig is extremely detected, attackers are shifting to different strategies of producing crypto,” Darktrace mentioned. “Whether or not that is extra worthwhile stays to be seen.”
The disclosure comes as Fortinet FortiGuard Labs revealed a brand new botnet dubbed RustoBot that is propagating by means of safety flaws in TOTOLINK (CVE-2022-26210 and CVE-2022-26187) and DrayTek (CVE-2024-12987) gadgets with an goal to conduct DDoS assaults. The exploitation efforts have been discovered to primarily goal the know-how sector in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Mexico.
“IoT and community gadgets are sometimes poorly defended endpoints, making them engaging targets for attackers to take advantage of and ship malicious applications,” safety researcher Vincent Li mentioned. “Strengthening endpoint monitoring and authentication can considerably cut back the danger of exploitation and assist mitigate malware campaigns.”
