Tag: Web Application Attacks

Figure 2: Alternative C&C server address hosted on Pastebin.com   One of the challenges that adversaries need to deal with is how to maintain a sustainable C&C infrastructure without being quickly denylisted by enterprise security solutions, or being frequently shut down by ISPs and hosting services following law enforcement and security vendors’ abuse reports. Many…

Read More

  Sure, the C&C list is a small sample size, and C&C hosts come and go quickly. This list is in no way exhaustive—it’s just a snapshot in time from last quarter. But for a breakdown of the domain hosting services, see the end of this article. “Yes, I really am a C&C server.” A…

Read More

The obvious takeaway here is that these two most commonly breached application vulnerabilities represent low hanging fruit for attackers. Forum software is a favorite target for attackers because they consume user content that if not sanitized properly could be a crafty little malicious script that injects a PHP backdoor. Forum makers (as well as CMS providers…

Read More

We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary here at F5 Labs, the application threat intelligence division of F5! Although F5 researchers have been providing threat-related, F5-specific guidance to our customers for many years through DevCentral, the time was right a year ago today to launch a dedicated website that provides the general public with vendor-neutral, application-focused, actionable…

Read More

Email attachment containing wire transfer instructions   Many buyers, in their eagerness to follow instructions to the letter so they can get into their new homes quickly, have followed similar wiring instructions and found themselves not only without a new home but stripped of their entire life savings—stolen by scammers. It nearly happened to Brown…

Read More

Every day, your web servers are increasingly being scanned—and likely attacked—by adversaries attempting to gain access to your infrastructure. Between 2015 and 2017, our data partner, Loryka, observed these types of scans grow from 200 per minute to as much as 2,000 per minute. These kinds of attackers are professionals; they do this for a…

Read More

Last week, a malware campaign targeting Jenkins automation servers was reported by CheckPoint researchers.1 The attackers exploited a deserialization vulnerability2 in Jenkin’s bidirectional channel (CVE-2017-1000353)3 to deploy Monero cryptomining malware that generated an estimated profit of $3 million. Following this disclosure, F5 researchers observed what appears to be the same threat actor group, as they…

Read More

F5 threat researchers detected attackers actively exploiting the rTorrent client through a previously undisclosed misconfiguration vulnerability and deploying a Monero (XMR) crypto-miner operation. The rTorrent client misconfiguration vulnerabilities include: No authentication required for XML-RPC communication Sensitive XML-RPC method is allowed (direct OS command execution) Attackers are actively exploiting this vulnerability in the wild by scanning…

Read More

An advanced thingbot, nicknamed Reaper (or IoTroop), was recently discovered infecting hordes of IoT devices. Reaper ups the ante for IoT security. It has a sophisticated C2 channel system and a Lua code execution environment (to deliver much more complicated attacks), and it comes prepackaged with 100 DNS open resolvers. Researchers are tracking Reaper, even…

Read More

Figure 2: Latest attack request targeting Windows servers   As shown in Figure 2, the latest attack requests are targeting the same URL, keeping the same HTTP header values and the same exploit structure, however, they are now using Windows shell commands to download and execute a file. Using the Windows certutil Tool While Linux…

Read More