Aqua Research Team

Recent findings by Aqua Nautilus have exposed significant flaws that are still active in the PowerShell Gallery's policy regarding package names and owners. These flaws make typosquatting attacks inevitable in this registry, while also making it extremely difficult for users to identify the true owner of a package. Consequently, these flaws pave the way for potential supply chain attacks on the registry's vast user base. 

If you thought that falling victim to ransomware, or a hacker hijacking your workstation was a nightmare, consider the potential catastrophe of having your Kubernetes (k8s) cluster hijacked. It could be a disaster magnified a million times over.

In 2017 and 2020 we saw the oddest campaign - ‘Meow’ - targeting unsecured databases such as MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, CouchDB, and other software such as Hadoop clusters, FTPs, Jenkins etc. The Modus Operandi was very simple finding an exposed instance, deleting everything, and destroying data without any explanation. Back in 2017 and 2020, it was quite a conundrum. There was little information about the attack and attackers. Now, the threat actor is back… 

A recent Java Developer Productivity Report  showed that almost 50% of developers are using Apache Tomcat, indicating its widespread usage in the cloud, big data and website development. We will begin by presenting statistics and examples from recent attacks. Afterward, we will delve into a detailed analysis of a single attack directed at one of our Apache Tomcat honeypots.

eBPF is a popular and powerful technology embedded in the Linux kernel. It is widely used by many security tools for monitoring kernel activity to detect and protect organizations. eBPF, however, can potentially be a dual edged sword as it can be used by threat actors as part of their malicious arsenal. Lately, we have seen a rise in the number of eBPF based tools used for malicious goals such as rootkits (ebpfkit, TripleCross) and malwares (pamspy). In this blog we explain how eBPF is used to instrument the kernel and demonstrate how we detected malicious usage of the eBPF.

In part one of this two-part blog series, titled "The Anatomy of Silentbob's Cloud Attack," we provided an overview of the preliminary stages of an aggressive botnet campaign that aimed at cloud native environments. This post will dive into the full extent of the campaign and provide a more comprehensive exploration of an extensive botnet infestation campaign.

Aqua Nautilus researchers identified an infrastructure of a potentially massive campaign against cloud native environments. This infrastructure is in early stages of testing and deployment, and is mainly consistent of an aggressive cloud worm, designed to deploy on exposed JupyterLab and Docker APIs in order to deploy Tsunami malware, cloud credentials hijack, resource hijack and further infestation of the worm. We strongly believe that TeamTNT is behind this new campaign. In this blog, the first in our two part series, we will unfold the story of this being developed attack infrastructure, speculate on the threat actor and the potential results of such a campaign.  

The adoption of cloud native technologies has become a cornerstone to helping businesses build and run applications. Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations design, develop, deploy, and manage their applications. While it has brought many benefits such as scalability, flexibility, and agility, it has also come with inherent complexities that have led to compromise and attack.  

Millions of GitHub repositories are potentially vulnerable to RepoJacking. New research by Aqua Nautilus sheds light on the extent of RepoJacking, which if exploited may lead to code execution on organizations’ internal environments or on their customers’ environments. As part of our research, we found an enormous source of data that allowed us to sample a dataset and find some highly popular targets.