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 programs working in CGI mode that would enable distant attackers to run arbitrary code.
Cybersecurity firm Bitdefender mentioned it has noticed a surge in exploitation makes an attempt in opposition to CVE-2024-4577 since late final yr, with a big 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
Martin Zugec, technical options director at Bitdefender, famous that at the very least 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 professional 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 mentioned it additionally noticed makes an attempt to switch firewall configurations on susceptible servers with an goal to dam entry to recognized malicious IPs related to the exploit.
This uncommon conduct has raised the likelihood that rival cryptojacking teams are competing for management over inclined assets and stopping them from concentrating on these beneath 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 concentrating on Japanese organizations because the begin of the yr.
Customers are suggested to replace their PHP installations to the newest model to safeguard in opposition to potential threats.
“Since most campaigns have been utilizing LOTL instruments, organizations ought to think about limiting the usage of instruments corresponding to PowerShell throughout the atmosphere to solely privileged customers corresponding to directors,” Zugec mentioned.