Cryptojacking

“CryptoSink” Campaign Deploys a New Miner Malware

Attackers continue to exploit old vulnerabilities, use new methods to kill competing crypto-miners, and survive removal by administrators.
March 13, 2019
8 min. read

Recently, threat researchers from F5 Networks spotted a new campaign targeting Elasticsearch systems. It leverages an exploit from 2014 to spread several new malwares designed to deploy an XMR (Monero) mining operation.

  • The campaign exploits a five-year-old vulnerability (CVE-2014-3120) in Elasticsearch systems running on both Windows and Linux platforms to mine XMR cryptocurrency.

  • On Linux, it delivers several previously unknown malwares (downloader and trojan) which weren’t detected by antivirus (AV) solutions.

  • It uses a unique method to kill competing crypto-miners on the infected machine by sinkholing (redirecting) their pool traffic to 127.1.1.1, thus shutting down the mining.

  • To survive a removal, it wraps the Linux rm command with a code to randomly reinstall the malware, making it more complex to understand how the system is continually reinfected. 

  • It backdoors the server by adding the attacker’s SSH keys.

  • It uses several command and control (C&C) servers; the current live C&C is located in China.

While analyzing the campaign we’ve named CryptoSink, we encountered a previously unseen method used by attackers to eliminate competitors on the infected machine and to persist on the server in a stealthier way by replacing the Linux remove (rm) command.

Initial Infection Vector

The attack starts with several malicious HTTP requests that target Elasticsearch running on both Windows and Linux machines.

Windows Payload

The Windows payload directly downloads a malicious executable file from the attacker’s server using a technique that became popular among similar threat actors. This technique involves calling the certutil utility, which ships with Windows, and is used to manipulate SSL certificates.

Figure 1. HTTP request delivering Windows payload
Figure 1. HTTP request delivering Windows payload

The downloaded malware named nvidia.exe is a common XMR cryptocurrency miner.

Figure 2. In VirusTotal, 53 engines detected the nvidia.exe file
Figure 2. In VirusTotal, 53 engines detected the nvidia.exe file

Linux Payload

In contrast to Windows, the payload for Linux involves several deployment steps. As in many similar campaigns, it uses the existing curl or wget Linux commands to download and execute a spearhead bash script named ctos.sh.

Figure 3. HTTP request delivering the Linux payload
Figure 3. HTTP request delivering the Linux payload

The bash script checks whether the machine is already part of the botnet and if not, downloads a binary malware named initdz2.

Figure 4: initdz2 is an ELF 64-bit executable file
Figure 4: initdz2 is an ELF 64-bit executable file

Custom Linux Dropper

The initdz2 malware coded in C++ acts as a dropper, which downloads and deploys additional malware files.

Figure 5. Linux malware files delivery flow
Figure 5. Linux malware files delivery flow

Besides downloading more binaries, the dropper includes additional interesting functionality. The attacker made the reversing process easier for the researchers by leaving the symbols in the binary.

Figure 6. The main function of the initdz2 malware
Figure 6. The main function of the initdz2 malware

Dropper Detection Ratio

Surprisingly, when running this sample by VirusTotal, the dropper is not flagged as a malicious file (at least, not at the time of this research).

Figure 7. Dropper is not being detected by antivirus solutions (at the time of this research)
Figure 7. Dropper is not being detected by antivirus solutions (at the time of this research)

While retrieving threat intelligence information from VirusTotal for the domain w.3ei.xyz,  from which the spearhead script and the dropper were downloaded, we can clearly see an additional initdz file that seems to be a previous version of the dropper. 

Figure 8. Files listed by VirusTotal under the w.3ei.xyz domain
Figure 8. Files listed by VirusTotal under the w.3ei.xyz domain

When checking against VirusTotal, it seems to produce different AV detection results when the same file is submitted through a link or directly uploaded to the system. When the file is submitted through a link, several AVs report it as malicious.

Figure 9. When the file is submitted through a link, VirusTotal has better detection results
Figure 9. When the file is submitted through a link, VirusTotal has better detection results

Command and Control (C&C) Redundancy

To provide for better survivability in case some of the domains are taken down, the dropper contains three hardcoded domains that it tries to resolve one by one until it finds one that is available.

Domains:

  • w.3ei.xyz
  • w.21-3n.xyz
  • w.21-2n.com

At the time of our research, only the “w.3ei.xyz” domain was alive.

Figure 10. Three hardcoded domains the dropper tries to contact
Figure 10. Three hardcoded domains the dropper tries to contact

The domain address resolves to a server located in China.

Figure 11. The C&C server is located in China
Figure 11. The C&C server is located in China

Sinkholing Competitors

In the current botnet crypto-wars, the CPU resources of the infected machines is the most critical factor. So far, the most common way we have seen for attackers to find and kill a competing crypto-miner on a newly infected machine is either by scanning through the running processes to find known malware names or by checking the processes that consume the highest amount of CPU.

In this case, the malware dropper introduces a more sophisticated tactic to paralyze competitors who survive the initial purge. We’ve called it “CryptoSink” because it sinkholes the outgoing traffic that is normally directed at popular cryptocurrency pools and redirects it to localhost (“127.0.0.1”) instead. It achieves this by writing the target pools’ domains to the “/etc/hosts” file. In doing so, the competitors’ miners are not able to connect to those cryptocurrency pools and fail to start the mining process, which frees up system resources on the infected machine.

Figure 12. Code responsible for sinkholing competitors’ malware to 127.0.0.1
Figure 12. Code responsible for sinkholing competitors’ malware to 127.0.0.1
Figure 13. Example of pool addresses added to the /etc/hosts file
Figure 13. Example of pool addresses added to the /etc/hosts file

The most noticeable are the pastebin.com, thyrsi.com, and zer0day.ru domains, which don’t seem to be common domain names of crypto pools.

While zer0day.ru historically had two subdomains, one of which seems to actually be a pool (pool.zer0day.com), we believe pastebin.com is being used as a popular C&C channel, thus blocking C&C traffic of such crypto-miners. Based on a scan from January 29, 2019, the thyrsi.com domain seemed to be hosting a Windows trojan, in the past based on a scan we have found from the 29th of January this year.

Figure 14. zer0day.ru subdomains reported observed by VirusTotal
Figure 14. zer0day.ru subdomains reported observed by VirusTotal
Figure 15. Scan results of a malware hosted on thyrsi.com provided by JoeSandbox
Figure 15. Scan results of a malware hosted on thyrsi.com provided by JoeSandbox

Backdooring the Server

To guarantee access to the server at any time, the CryptoSink dropper chooses to use two different tactics. First, it adds the threat actor’s public SSH key to the authorized_keys file on the victim machine. This way the threat actor can directly connect to the machine using the SSH protocol.

Figure 16. Backdoor SSH key that is added on the victim machine
Figure 16. Backdoor SSH key that is added on the victim machine

Then the dropper downloads two additional binary files. The first one, migrations, is a watchdog that is responsible for executing the second downloaded file, httpdz.

Figure 17. The watchdog code responsible for the executing the backdoor
Figure 17. The watchdog code responsible for the executing the backdoor

The file httpdz is another custom C++ malware implementing a backdoor/trojan functionality. Like the dropper, it tries to connect one of three hardcoded C&C domains and start polling it for commands over a TCP socket. The communication protocol is quite simple and includes predefined ASCII codes that represent different commands used to do the following:

  • Execute CMD command using Popen Linux call
  • Gather Information about the hardware (CPU, memory, and more)
  • Get information about five processes that consume the most CPU on the machine
  • Download link and execute
  • Connect to another C&C server
  • Execute a command by spawning a new “process” using fork and execvp system calls
  • Sleep
  • Terminate

Interestingly enough, this backdoor is also not detected by VirusTotal.

Figure 18.  The backdoor binary is not detected by any AV at the time of the research
Figure 18. The backdoor binary is not detected by any AV at the time of the research

Getting Persistency

CryptoSink deploys different techniques to get persistency on the infected machine. It creates a cronjob to download and execute two malicious bash scripts, init.sh and crontab.sh, in constant small intervals. The script named init.sh is mostly identical to the original spearhead script ctos.sh, while crontab.sh was empty at the time of the research.

Figure 19. cron job used to download and execute a bash script
Figure 19. cron job used to download and execute a bash script

The second persistency method creates a service that is configured to execute the dropper upon different events, such as after a system reboot.

Figure 20. New service is added by the CryptoSink malware
Figure 20. New service is added by the CryptoSink malware
Figure 21. The service is running the dropper
Figure 21. The service is running the dropper

Impersonating the Linux rm Command

To survive a malware cleanup, CryptoSink goes for a stealthier persistency method. It renames the original rm binary (that is, the Linux “remove” command) to rmm and replaces it with a malicious file named rm, which is downloaded from its C&C server.

Figure 22. The code in the dropper that is responsible for replacing the rm binary file
Figure 22. The code in the dropper that is responsible for replacing the rm binary file

Now, each time the user executes the rm command, the forged rm file will randomly decide if it should additionally execute a malicious code, and only then will it call the real rm command (that is, execute the file now that’s now named rmm). The malicious code in the rm binary will check if the cronjob exists and if not, it will be added again.

Figure 23. The code that is responsible for invoking the real “rm” command
Figure 23. The code that is responsible for invoking the real “rm” command

The irony is that even if the infected server’s administrator were to detect the other malicious files and try to remove them, she would probably use the rm command which, in turn, would reinstall the malware. Randomly executing the malicious code could make the administrator go crazy trying to understand how the machine continues to get re-infected.

Figure 24. A simple randomization in the malicious rm code
Figure 24. A simple randomization in the malicious rm code

Linux Miner

Finally, the dropper deploys an XMRig crypto-miner. This variation is slightly modified to include a hardcoded configuration, like the wallet address.

Figure 25. XMRig hardcoded configuration
Figure 25. XMRig hardcoded configuration

The XMRig miner is configured to use a publicly available pool, which enables us to see the number of mining nodes and the earnings from this campaign using the wallet address.

Figure 26. Wallet address is 4DSQMNzzq46N1z2pZWAVdeA6JvUL9TCB2bnBiA3ZzoqEdYJnMydt5akCa3vtmapeDsbVKGPFdNkzqTcJS8M8oyK7WGijzKrMTGkC671HT6
Figure 26. Wallet address is 4DSQMNzzq46N1z2pZWAVdeA6JvUL9TCB2bnBiA3ZzoqEdYJnMydt5akCa3vtmapeDsbVKGPFdNkzqTcJS8M8oyK7WGijzKrMTGkC671HT6
Figure 27. The mining revenue for this wallet at the time of this research
Figure 27. The mining revenue for this wallet at the time of this research

An additional wallet ID was found in one of the earlier versions of the miner used by the threat actor. This is still located on the file server used by the campaign.

Wallet id: 448aZSQhyDBCZokwmVd5HG5Gp7UrAeLVuVmZbKcs4rTZTx1UXGECxbePXha3qncffYYhJjG5FRGxM1scV9dbN62VCGiPdtQ

Figure 28. The mining revenue for the second wallet at the time of this research
Figure 28. The mining revenue for the second wallet at the time of this research

As the operation has just started the profit is still not so big standing on about $4,500.

Summary

The rise of crypto mining botnets and the decline in crypto currency value makes it a tougher competition. Threat actors deploy new creative tactics to take competitors out of business, take control over the wishful CPU resource, and retain persistency on the infected server. Ironically, the crypto-miner sinkholing technique deployed by the current attackers could be also reviewed by defenders as a countermeasure. However, to avoid the initial infection, defenders should deploy a more effective patching processes, whether it is done in the code or virtually by a web application firewall.

Authors & Contributors
Andrey Shalnev (Author)
Security Researcher
Maxim Zavodchik (Author)
Security Research Group Manager

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