perfctl: A Stealthy Malware Targeting Millions of Linux Servers

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

perfctl: A Stealthy Malware Targeting Millions of Linux Servers

Security Threat

In this blog post, Aqua Nautilus researchers aim to shed light on a Linux malware that, over the past 3-4 years, has actively sought more than 20,000 types of misconfigurations in order to target and exploit Linux servers. If you have a Linux server connected to the internet, you could be at risk. In fact, …

SECURITY RESEARCH

CUPS: A Critical 9.9 Linux Vulnerability Reviewed

Security Threat

In the past couple of days there has been many troubling publications and discussions about a mysterious critical Linux vulnerability allowing remote code execution. While this headline is very alarming, after diving into details there are many preconditions that cool down the level of alertness. Aqua Security researchers have looked into the content that was …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Sink or Swim: Tackling 2024’s Record-Breaking Vulnerability Wave

28,821 — that’s the number of vulnerabilities reported last year alone. With over 28,000 CVEs this year so far, 2024 is on track to set an even more troubling record. As cloud native technologies have become the backbone of modern IT infrastructure, these staggering figures highlight a growing and urgent threat. In this blog, we’ll …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Hadooken Malware Targets Weblogic Applications

Aqua Nautilus researchers identified a new Linux malware targeting Weblogic servers. The main payload calls itself Hadooken which we think is referring to the attack “surge fist” in the Street Fighter series. When Hadooken is executed, it drops a Tsunami malware and deploys a cryptominer. In this blog, we explain the malware, its components, and …

SECURITY RESEARCH

PG_MEM: A Malware Hidden in the Postgres Processes

Aqua Nautilus researchers have uncovered PG_MEM, a new PostgreSQL malware, that brute forces its way into PostgreSQL databases, delivers payloads to hide its operations, and mines cryptocurrency. In this blog, we explain this attack, the techniques used by the threat actor, and how to detect and protect your environments.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Gafgyt Malware Variant Exploits GPU Power and Cloud Native Environments

Aqua Nautilus researchers discovered a new variant of Gafgyt botnet. This campaign is targeting machines with weak SSH passwords, executing 2 binaries from memory to increase the Gafgyt botnet and mine crypto currency with GPU power, indicating that the IoT botnet is targeting more robust servers running on cloud native environments. In this blog we …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Bucket Monopoly: Breaching AWS Accounts Through Shadow Resources

Security Threat

During February 2024, we discovered critical vulnerabilities in six AWS services. The impact of these vulnerabilities range between remote code execution (RCE), full-service user takeover (which might provide powerful administrative access), manipulation of AI modules, exposing sensitive data, data exfiltration and denial of service.

SECURITY RESEARCH

TrailShark: Understanding AWS API and Service Interactions

In this blog, we introduce TrailShark, a plugin that connects Wireshark with AWS CloudTrail logs. This open-source tool was developed as part of the “Bucket Monopoly” research, during which we identified six vulnerabilities in AWS by tracking service interactions and internal API calls. These vulnerabilities range from remote code execution (RCE) and full-service user takeover …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Panamorfi: A New Discord DDoS Campaign

Aqua Nautilus researchers uncovered a new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) campaign dubbed ‘Panamorfi’, utilizing the Java written minecraft DDoS package – mineping – the threat actor launches a DDoS. Thus far we’ve only seen it deployed via misconfigured Jupyter notebooks. In this blog we explain about this attack, the techniques used by the threat …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Kubernetes Exposed: Exploiting the Kubelet API

Kubelet API is a vital component in Kubernetes clusters that manages pods and their containers on each node. While it is not typically intended for direct user interaction, many DevOps teams may utilize the Kubelet API for debugging and direct node communication. However, exposing the Kubelet API to the public internet while enabling anonymous unauthenticated …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Phantom Secrets: Undetected Secrets Expose Major Corporations

Security Threat

For years, we’ve been educating developers not to hard-code secrets into their code. Now it turns out that even doing this once might permanently expose that secret, even after its apparent removal – and worse, most secrets scanning methods will miss it. Our research found that almost 18% of secrets might be overlooked.

SECURITY RESEARCH, VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT

Muhstik Malware Targets Message Queuing Services Applications

Aqua Nautilus discovered a new campaign of Muhstik malware targeting message queuing services applications, specifically the Apache RocketMQ platform. Our investigation revealed that the attackers downloaded the known malware Muhstik onto the compromised instances by exploiting a known vulnerability in the platform. In this blog, we will explore how the attackers exploit the existing vulnerability …

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