Menace 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 methods operating in CGI mode that would permit distant attackers to run arbitrary code.
Cybersecurity firm Bitdefender mentioned it has noticed a surge in exploitation makes an attempt towards 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 primary 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 permits customers to promote computing energy for cryptocurrency,” Zugec added. “The miner course of was disguised as a legit utility, akin 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 change firewall configurations on weak servers with an purpose to dam entry to recognized malicious IPs related to the exploit.
This uncommon conduct has raised the chance that rival cryptojacking teams are competing for management over vulnerable sources and stopping them from concentrating on these underneath their management a second time. It is also in keeping with 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 for the reason that begin of the yr.
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 take into account limiting using instruments akin to PowerShell inside the atmosphere to solely privileged customers akin to directors,” Zugec mentioned.