Headline
Kinsing Actors Exploiting Recent Linux Flaw to Breach Cloud Environments
The threat actors linked to Kinsing have been observed attempting to exploit the recently disclosed Linux privilege escalation flaw called Looney Tunables as part of a “new experimental campaign” designed to breach cloud environments. “Intriguingly, the attacker is also broadening the horizons of their cloud-native attacks by extracting credentials from the Cloud Service Provider (CSP),” cloud
The threat actors linked to Kinsing have been observed attempting to exploit the recently disclosed Linux privilege escalation flaw called Looney Tunables as part of a “new experimental campaign” designed to breach cloud environments.
“Intriguingly, the attacker is also broadening the horizons of their cloud-native attacks by extracting credentials from the Cloud Service Provider (CSP),” cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
The development marks the first publicly documented instance of active exploitation of Looney Tunables (CVE-2023-4911), which could allow a threat actor to gain root privileges.
Kinsing actors have a track record of opportunistically and swiftly adapting their attack chains to exploit newly disclosed security flaws to their advantage, having most recently weaponized a high-severity bug in Openfire (CVE-2023-32315) to achieve remote code execution.
The latest set of attacks entails exploiting a critical remote code execution shortcoming in PHPUnit (CVE-2017-9841), a tactic known to be employed by the cryptojacking group since at least 2021, to obtain initial access.
This is followed by manually probing the victim environment for Looney Tunables using a Python-based exploit published by a researcher who goes by the alias bl4sty on X (formerly Twitter).
“Subsequently, Kinsing fetches and executes an additional PHP exploit,” Aqua said. “Initially, the exploit is obscured; however, upon de-obfuscation, it reveals itself to be a JavaScript designed for further exploitative activities.”
The JavaScript code, for its part, is a web shell that grants backdoor access to the server, enabling the adversary to perform file management, command execution, and gather more information about the machine it’s running on.
The end goal of the attack appears to be to extract credentials associated with the cloud service provider for follow-on attacks, a significant tactical shift from its pattern of deploying the Kinsing malware and launching a cryptocurrency miner.
“This marks the inaugural instance of Kinsing actively seeking to gather such information,” the company said.
“This recent development suggests a potential broadening of their operational scope, signaling that the Kinsing operation may diversify and intensify in the near future, thereby posing an increased threat to cloud-native environments.”
Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.
Related news
Red Hat uses a four-point impact scale to classify security issues affecting our products. Have you ever asked yourself what it takes and what the requirements are for each point of the scale? We will talk through the highlights of our process in this article.Is this a CVE?First and foremost, what is a CVE? Short for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, it is a list of publicly disclosed computer security flaws. Learn more in this Red Hat post.To receive a severity rating, the issue needs to be a CVE. But what does it take to be a CVE? In order to warrant a CVE ID, a vulnerability has to comp
By Deeba Ahmed The AndroxGh0st malware was initially reported in December 2022. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: FBI: Androxgh0st Malware Building Mega-Botnet for Credential Theft
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that threat actors deploying the AndroxGh0st malware are creating a botnet for "victim identification and exploitation in target networks." A Python-based malware, AndroxGh0st was first documented by Lacework in December 2022, with the malware
Red Hat Security Advisory 2024-0033-03 - An update for redhat-release-virtualization-host and redhat-virtualization-host is now available for Red Hat Virtualization 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.
By Deeba Ahmed Patches for all affected versions of Apache ActiveMQ have been released, and clients are strongly advised to upgrade their systems. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Kinsing Crypto Malware Targets Linux Systems via Apache ActiveMQ Flaw
Hello everyone! October was an interesting and busy month for me. I started a new job, worked on my open source Vulristics project, and analyzed vulnerabilities using it. Especially Linux vulnerabilities as part of my new Linux Patch Wednesday project. And, of course, analyzed Microsoft Patch Tuesday as well. In addition, at the end of […]
Dubbed Looney Tunables, Qualys discovered a buffer overflow vulnerability in the glibc dynamic loader's processing of the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. This vulnerability was introduced in April 2021 (glibc 2.34) by commit 2ed18c.
Red Hat Security Advisory 2023-5476-01 - The glibc packages provide the standard C libraries, POSIX thread libraries, standard math libraries, and the name service cache daemon used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux system cannot function correctly. Issues addressed include buffer overflow and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
Red Hat Security Advisory 2023-5455-01 - The glibc packages provide the standard C libraries, POSIX thread libraries, standard math libraries, and the name service cache daemon used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux system cannot function correctly. Issues addressed include buffer overflow, privilege escalation, and use-after-free vulnerabilities.
Red Hat Security Advisory 2023-5453-01 - The glibc packages provide the standard C libraries, POSIX thread libraries, standard math libraries, and the name service cache daemon used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux system cannot function correctly. Issues addressed include buffer overflow, privilege escalation, and use-after-free vulnerabilities.
Red Hat Security Advisory 2023-5454-01 - The glibc packages provide the standard C libraries, POSIX thread libraries, standard math libraries, and the name service cache daemon used by multiple programs on the system. Without these libraries, the Linux system cannot function correctly. Issues addressed include buffer overflow and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
Gentoo Linux Security Advisory 202310-3 - Multiple vulnerabilities in glibc could result in Local Privilege Escalation. Versions greater than or equal to 2.37-r7 are affected.
Ubuntu Security Notice 6409-1 - It was discovered that the GNU C Library incorrectly handled the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. An attacker could possibly use this issue to perform a privilege escalation attack. It was discovered that the GNU C Library incorrectly handled certain DNS responses when the system was configured in no-aaaa mode. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause the GNU C Library to crash, resulting in a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 23.04.
Debian Linux Security Advisory 5514-1 - The Qualys Research Labs discovered a buffer overflow in the dynamic loader's processing of the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. An attacker can exploit this flaw for privilege escalation.
A new Linux security vulnerability dubbed Looney Tunables has been discovered in the GNU C library's ld.so dynamic loader that, if successfully exploited, could lead to a local privilege escalation and allow a threat actor to gain root privileges. Tracked as CVE-2023-4911 (CVSS score: 7.8), the issue is a buffer overflow that resides in the dynamic loader's processing of the GLIBC_TUNABLES
A buffer overflow was discovered in the GNU C Library's dynamic loader ld.so while processing the GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variable. This issue could allow a local attacker to use maliciously crafted GLIBC_TUNABLES environment variables when launching binaries with SUID permission to execute code with elevated privileges.
Recently disclosed security flaws impacting Juniper firewalls, Openfire, and Apache RocketMQ servers have come under active exploitation in the wild, according to multiple reports. The Shadowserver Foundation said that it's "seeing exploitation attempts from multiple IPs for Juniper J-Web CVE-2023-36844 (& friends) targeting /webauth_operation.php endpoint," the same day a proof-of-concept (PoC)
Thousands of Openfire XMPP servers are unpatched against a recently disclosed high-severity flaw and are susceptible to a new exploit, according to a new report from VulnCheck. Tracked as CVE-2023-32315 (CVSS score: 7.5), the vulnerability relates to a path traversal vulnerability in Openfire's administrative console that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to access otherwise restricted
Openfire is an XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. Openfire's administrative console, a web-based application, was found to be vulnerable to a path traversal attack via the setup environment. This permitted an unauthenticated user to use the unauthenticated Openfire Setup Environment in an already configured Openfire environment to access restricted pages in the Openfire Admin Console reserved for administrative users. This Metasploit module will use the vulnerability to create a new admin user that will be used to upload a Openfire management plugin weaponized with a java native payload that triggers remote code execution. This vulnerability affects all versions of Openfire that have been released since April 2015, starting with version 3.10.0. The problem has been patched in Openfire release 4.7.5 and 4.6.8, and further improvements will be included in the first version on the 4.8 branch, which is version 4.8.0.
Openfire is an XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. Openfire's administrative console, a web-based application, was found to be vulnerable to a path traversal attack via the setup environment. This permitted an unauthenticated user to use the unauthenticated Openfire Setup Environment in an already configured Openfire environment to access restricted pages in the Openfire Admin Console reserved for administrative users. This vulnerability affects all versions of Openfire that have been released since April 2015, starting with version 3.10.0. The problem has been patched in Openfire release 4.7.5 and 4.6.8, and further improvements will be included in the yet-to-be released first version on the 4.8 branch (which is expected to be version 4.8.0). Users are advised to upgrade. If an Openfire upgrade isn’t available for a specific release, or isn’t quickly actionable, users may see the linked github advisory (GHSA-gw42-f939-fhvm) for mitigation advice.
An important security issue affects a range of versions of Openfire, the cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP protocol that is created by the Ignite Realtime community. ### Impact Openfire's administrative console (the Admin Console), a web-based application, was found to be vulnerable to a path traversal attack via the setup environment. This permitted an unauthenticated user to use the unauthenticated Openfire Setup Environment in an already configured Openfire environment to access restricted pages in the Openfire Admin Console reserved for administrative users. ### Cause Path traversal protections were already in place to protect against exactly this kind of attack, but didn’t defend against certain non-standard URL encoding for UTF-16 characters, that were not supported by the embedded webserver that was in use at the time. A later upgrade of the embedded webserver included support for non-standard URL encoding of UTF-16 characters. The path traversa...
Vulnerability in the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Unified Audit component of Oracle Database Server. Supported versions that are affected are 12.1.0.2, 12.2.0.1 and 19c. Easily exploitable vulnerability allows high privileged attacker having Local Logon privilege with network access via Oracle Net to compromise Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Unified Audit. Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized update, insert or delete access to some of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Unified Audit accessible data. CVSS 3.1 Base Score 2.7 (Integrity impacts). CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N).