Uncovered PostgreSQL cases are the goal of an ongoing marketing campaign designed to achieve unauthorized entry and deploy cryptocurrency miners.
Cloud safety agency Wiz mentioned the exercise is a variant of an intrusion set that was first flagged by Aqua Safety in August 2024 that concerned the usage of a malware pressure dubbed PG_MEM. The marketing campaign has been attributed to a risk actor Wiz tracks as JINX-0126.
“The risk actor has since developed, implementing protection evasion methods similar to deploying binaries with a singular hash per goal and executing the miner payload filelessly – prone to evade detection by [cloud workload protection platform] options that rely solely on file hash popularity,” researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Yaara Shriki, and Gili Tikochinski mentioned.
Wiz has additionally revealed that the marketing campaign has probably claimed over 1,500 victims so far, indicating that publicly-exposed PostgreSQL cases with weak or predictable credentials are prevalent sufficient to grow to be an assault goal for opportunistic risk actors.
Essentially the most distinctive side of the marketing campaign is the abuse of the COPY … FROM PROGRAM SQL command to execute arbitrary shell instructions on the host.
The entry afforded by the profitable exploitation of weakly configured PostgreSQL companies is used to conduct preliminary reconnaissance and drop a Base64-encoded payload, which, in actuality, is a shell script that kills competing cryptocurrency miners and drops a binary named PG_CORE.
Additionally downloaded to the server is an obfuscated Golang binary codenamed postmaster that mimics the respectable PostgreSQL multi-user database server. It is designed to arrange persistence on the host utilizing a cron job, create a brand new position with elevated privileges, and write one other binary referred to as cpu_hu to disk.
cpu_hu, for its half, downloads the newest model of the XMRig miner from GitHub and launches it filelessly by way of a identified Linux fileless method known as memfd.
“The risk actor is assigning a singular mining employee to every sufferer,” Wiz mentioned, including it recognized three totally different wallets linked to the risk actor. “Every pockets had roughly 550 staff. Mixed, this means that the marketing campaign might have leveraged over 1,500 compromised machines.”
