Uncovered PostgreSQL situations are the goal of an ongoing marketing campaign designed to realize unauthorized entry and deploy cryptocurrency miners.
Cloud security agency Wiz stated the exercise is a variant of an intrusion set that was first flagged by Aqua Safety in August 2024 that concerned the usage of a malware pressure dubbed PG_MEM. The marketing campaign has been attributed to a risk actor Wiz tracks as JINX-0126.
“The risk actor has since advanced, implementing protection evasion methods akin to deploying binaries with a singular hash per goal and executing the miner payload filelessly – more likely to evade detection by [cloud workload protection platform] options that rely solely on file hash status,” researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Yaara Shriki, and Gili Tikochinski stated.
Wiz has additionally revealed that the marketing campaign has doubtless claimed over 1,500 victims to this point, indicating that publicly-exposed PostgreSQL situations with weak or predictable credentials are prevalent sufficient to turn out to be an assault goal for opportunistic risk actors.
Essentially the most distinctive facet of the marketing campaign is the abuse of the COPY … FROM PROGRAM SQL command to execute arbitrary shell instructions on the host.
The entry afforded by the profitable exploitation of weakly configured PostgreSQL companies is used to conduct preliminary reconnaissance and drop a Base64-encoded payload, which, in actuality, is a shell script that kills competing cryptocurrency miners and drops a binary named PG_CORE.
Additionally downloaded to the server is an obfuscated Golang binary codenamed postmaster that mimics the reliable PostgreSQL multi-user database server. It is designed to arrange persistence on the host utilizing a cron job, create a brand new function with elevated privileges, and write one other binary known as cpu_hu to disk.
cpu_hu, for its half, downloads the newest model of the XMRig miner from GitHub and launches it filelessly by way of a recognized Linux fileless approach known as memfd.
“The risk actor is assigning a singular mining employee to every sufferer,” Wiz stated, including it recognized three totally different wallets linked to the risk actor. “Every pockets had roughly 550 employees. Mixed, this implies that the marketing campaign may have leveraged over 1,500 compromised machines.”
