Akamai | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An active financially motivated campaign is targeting vulnerable SSH servers to covertly ensnare them into a proxy network. "This is an active campaign in which the attacker leverages SSH for remote access, running malicious scripts that stealthily enlist victim servers into a peer-to-peer (P2P) proxy network, such as Peer2Profit or Honeygain," Akamai researcher Allen West said in a Thursday report. Unlike cryptojacking, in which a compromised system's resources are used to illicitly mine cryptocurrency, proxyjacking offers the ability for threat actors to leverage the victim's unused bandwidth to clandestinely run different services as a P2P node. This offers two-fold benefits: It not only enables the attacker to monetize the extra bandwidth with a significantly reduced resource load that would be necessary to carry out cryptojacking, it also reduces the chances of discovery. "It is a stealthier alternative to cryptojacking and has serious implications th

An ongoing analysis into an up-and-coming cryptocurrency mining botnet known as KmsdBot has led to it being accidentally taken down by the threat actors themselves. KmsdBot, as christened by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), came to light mid-November 2022 for its ability to  brute-force systems  with weak SSH credentials. The botnet strikes both Windows and Linux devices spanning a wide range of microarchitectures with the primary goal of deploying mining software and corralling the compromised hosts into a DDoS bot. Some of the major targets included gaming firms, technology companies, and luxury car manufacturers. Akamai researcher Larry W. Cashdollar, in a new update, explained how commands sent by the malware operators to carry out a DDoS attack against the bitcoin[.]com website inadvertently neutralized the malware. "Interestingly, after one single improperly formatted command, the bot stopped sending commands," Cashdollar  said . "It&#

A newly discovered evasive malware leverages the Secure Shell ( SSH ) cryptographic protocol to gain entry into targeted systems with the goal of mining cryptocurrency and carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Dubbed  KmsdBot  by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), the Golang-based malware has been found targeting a variety of companies ranging from gaming to luxury car brands to security firms. "The botnet infects systems via an SSH connection that uses weak login credentials," Akamai researcher Larry W. Cashdollar  said . "The malware does not stay persistent on the infected system as a way of evading detection." The malware gets its name from an executable named "kmsd.exe" that's downloaded from a remote server following a successful compromise. It's also designed to support multiple architectures, such as Winx86, Arm64, mips64, and x86_64. KmsdBot comes with capabilities to perform scanning operatio

A peer-to-peer Golang botnet has resurfaced after more than a year to compromise servers belonging to entities in the healthcare, education, and government sectors within a span of a month, infecting a total of 1,500 hosts. Dubbed FritzFrog , "the decentralized botnet targets any device that exposes an SSH server — cloud instances, data center servers, routers, etc. — and is capable of running any malicious payload on infected nodes," Akamai researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The new wave of attacks commenced in early December 2021, only to pick up pace and register a 10x growth in its infection rate in a month's time, while peaking at 500 incidents per day in January 2022. The cybersecurity firm said it detected infected machines in a European television channel network, a Russian manufacturer of healthcare equipment, and multiple universities in East Asia. FritzFrog was  first documented  by Guardicore in August 2020, elaborating the botnet&