Threat Alert: Exploiting Open Docker Daemons for DDoS Attacks

Aqua Nautilus Research Blog

Nautilus focuses on cybersecurity research of the cloud native stack, missioned to uncover new vulnerabilities, threats and attacks that target containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and public cloud infrastructure.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Threat Alert: Exploiting Open Docker Daemons for DDoS Attacks

Aqua’s research team continuously investigates and analyzes the anatomy of new attacks in the wild. Recently, we identified attacks that exploited misconfigured open Docker daemons, where attackers were actively using this attack vector to hijack environments in order to launch targeted DDoS attacks. Each of the attacks were carried out using a botnet of containers, …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Maneuver Docker API for Host Takeover

Docker clients can communicate with the daemon either locally, via a unix socket, or over a network via a TCP socket. Aqua’s research team discovered an interesting attack vector running on top of an unsecured Docker socket API. Instead of running a malicious Docker image, the attacker changes the traditional entry-point to take control over …

SECURITY RESEARCH

CVE-2019-14287 sudo Vulnerability Allows Bypass of User Restrictions

A new vulnerability was discovered earlier this week in the sudo package. Sudo is one of the most powerful and commonly used utilities installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating system.

SECURITY RESEARCH

DNS Spoofing on Kubernetes Clusters

In this post I’ll describe how an attacker, who manages to run malicious code on a cluster can, with no special permissive permissions, successfully spoof DNS responses to all the applications running on the cluster, and from there execute a MITM (Man In The Middle) on all network traffic of pods.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Kubernetes Pod Escape Using Log Mounts

Kubernetes has many moving parts, and sometimes combining them in certain ways can create unexpected security flaws. In this post you’ll see how a pod running as root and with a mount point to the node’s /var/log directory can expose the entire contents of its host filesystem to any user who has access to its …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Crypto-Mining Malware Outsmarting Image Scanners

In previous crypto-mining attacks, we observed hackers investing little to no effort in hiding their malicious activities. They just ran the malicious container with all of its scripts and configuration files in clear text. This made the analysis of their malicious intent fairly easy.

SECURITY RESEARCH

CVE-2019-11246: Another kubectl Path Traversal Vulnerability Disclosed

A new vulnerability (CVE-2019-11246) was disclosed that enables path traversal in kubectl, the popular command line interface for running commands on Kubernetes clusters. What’s interesting about this CVE is that we’ve already seen two previous variations of the same vulnerability disclosed and patched. Read on to learn how that happened.

SECURITY RESEARCH

CVE-2019-5021: Alpine Docker Image ‘null root password’ Vulnerability

A new vulnerability that impacts Alpine Docker images was published last week. The vulnerability is due to the ‘root’ user password which is set, by default, to NULL on Alpine Docker images from version 3.3 or higher.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Mitigating High Severity RunC Vulnerability (CVE-2019-5736)

Yesterday it was disclosed that a new high severity (CVSS score 7.2) vulnerability (CVE-2019-5736) was found in runc, that allows an attacker to potentially compromise the container host. Patches are already available from most providers (see below). Aqua customers can also prevent this vulnerability from being exploited by applying the appropriate runtime policies.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Cryptocurrency Miners Abusing Containers: Anatomy of an (Attempted) Attack

This isn’t a story about a Docker vulnerability; it’s a story about how hackers are looking for unsecured Docker deployments where they can mine cryptocurrency. You shouldn’t leave your Docker daemon unsecured any more than you would leave your mail server unsecured. We’ve heard many accounts of attempted (sometimes successful) cryptocurrency mining attacks on container …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Bugs Gone Wild: Container (Stack) Clash and CVE-2017-1000253

A Stack Clash is a vulnerability in the memory management of several operating systems, including Linux. It can be exploited by attackers to corrupt memory of a privileged process in order to execute arbitrary code.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Dirty COW Vulnerability: Impact on Containers

There has been plenty of buzz lately regarding an old-new privilege escalation vulnerability, adorably named “Dirty COW” after the Copy-On-Write memory protection in the Linux kernel. The whole thing started roughly eleven years ago, when a kernel developer left a race condition issue opened: “This is an ancient bug that was actually attempted to be …

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