A risk group of suspected Romanian origin referred to as RUBYCARP has been noticed sustaining a long-running botnet for finishing up crypto mining, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and phishing assaults.
The group, believed to be energetic for a minimum of 10 years, employs the botnet for monetary acquire, Sysdig mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
“Its major technique of operation leverages a botnet deployed utilizing a wide range of public exploits and brute-force assaults,” the cloud security agency mentioned. “This group communicates through private and non-private IRC networks.”
Proof gathered up to now means that RUBYCARP might have crossover with one other risk cluster tracked by Albanian cybersecurity agency Alphatechs beneath the moniker Outlaw, which has a historical past of conducting crypto mining and brute-force assaults and has since pivoted to phishing and spear-phishing campaigns to solid a large web.
“These phishing emails usually lure victims into revealing delicate data, similar to login credentials or monetary particulars,” security researcher Brenton Isufi mentioned in a report revealed in late December 2023.
A notable facet of RUBYCARP’s tradecraft is using a malware referred to as ShellBot (aka PerlBot) to breach goal environments. It has additionally been noticed exploiting security flaws within the Laravel Framework (e.g., CVE-2021-3129), a way additionally adopted by different risk actors like AndroxGh0st.
In an indication that the attackers are increasing their arsenal of preliminary entry strategies to broaden the size of the botnet, Sysdig mentioned it found indicators of WordPress websites being compromised utilizing generally used usernames and passwords.
“As soon as entry is obtained, a backdoor is put in based mostly on the favored Perl ShellBot,” the corporate mentioned. “The sufferer’s server is then linked to an [Internet Relay Chat] server performing as command-and-control, and joins the bigger botnet.”
The botnet is estimated to comprise over 600 hosts, with the IRC server (“chat.juicessh[.]professional”) created on Could 1, 2023. It closely depends on IRC for common communications in addition to for managing its botnets and coordinating crypto mining campaigns.
Moreover, members of the group – named juice_, Eugen, Catalin, MUIE, and Smecher, amongst others – have been discovered to speak through an Undernet IRC channel referred to as #cristi. Additionally put to make use of is a mass scanner device to search out new potential hosts.
RUBYCARP’s arrival on the cyber risk scene isn’t a surprise given their capability to reap the benefits of the botnet to gasoline numerous illicit earnings streams similar to crypto mining and phishing operations to steal bank card numbers.
Whereas it seems that the stolen bank card knowledge is used to buy assault infrastructure, there’s additionally the likelihood that the data could possibly be monetized by means of different means by promoting it within the cyber crime underground.
“These risk actors are additionally concerned within the growth and sale of cyber weapons, which is not quite common,” Sysdig mentioned. “They’ve a big arsenal of instruments they’ve constructed up over time, which provides them fairly a variety of flexibility when conducting their operations.
