Kaiji Malware: Anatomy, Persistence and Detection

Kaiji malware has emerged as a significant threat in recent years, particularly targeting Linux-based servers and IoT devices. This malware is designed to exploit internet connected services and devices to gain unauthorized access to systems. Once inside, Kaiji establishes persistence through various techniques, including creating system services and modifying system configurations.

With the growing popularity of CI platforms to build software, bad actors are increasingly looking to exploit these environments to target organizations. In our post about the recent Codecov breach, we explored how an attacker was able to get access to credentials from within the CI/CD pipeline. To prevent this from happening, you need to …

In September 2020, Aqua’s Team Nautilus detected a campaign that targeted the automated build processes of GitHub and Docker Hub. At that time we notified the affected services and they blocked the attack. Now, this campaign has resurfaced with vengeance. In just four days, the attackers set up 92 malicious Docker Hub registries and 92 …

Last week, TeamTNT launched a new campaign against Docker and Kubernetes environments. Using a collection of container images that are hosted in Docker Hub, the attackers are targeting misconfigured docker daemons, Kubeflow dashboards, and Weave Scope, exploiting these environments in order to steal cloud credentials, open backdoors, mine cryptocurrency, and launch a worm that is …

With an ever-evolving threat landscape, bad actors increasingly target container infrastructure, installing sophisticated malware into images that changes its behavior to evade detection. As static scanning is not designed to spot such advanced threats, it’s critical to perform dynamic analysis to detect suspicious behavior in real time.

Over the past few weeks, TeamTNT grabbed headlines after launching several novel attacks against cloud native infrastructure. In response, Docker Hub decided to remove TeamTNT’s malicious images from its community and deleted the user ‘Hildeteamtnt.’ But just a few days later, TeamTNT reemerged with a catchy logo “Still alive” embedded in their scripts (although “still …

We have some exciting news about two new features in Tracee, Aqua’s open source container and system tracing utility. Now, Tracee is much more than just a system call tracer, it’s a powerful tool that can be used to perform forensic investigations and dynamic analysis of binaries – both are incredibly useful when looking for hidden malware. Tracee can provide users with timely insights that previously required special knowledge and tools.

Following an attack against a misconfigured Docker API port, the research team at Aqua Security performed an in-depth examination of the Docker Hub account from which the image was pulled. The examination was done by dynamically scanning for hidden threats in the container images hosted in that specific Docker Hub account (ubuntuz) and comparing them …

Container images are a growing path for external code to enter an organization. Docker has simplified image workflow in order to encourage adoption by developers, so anyone can pull and run images that were built and pushed to Docker Hub, often by unknown individuals. This is being exploited by malicious actors to embed sophisticated malware …