Top 6 Threat Discoveries of 2018

Over the course of 2018, Radware’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) identified several cyberattacks and security threats across the globe. Below is a round-up of our top discoveries from the past year. For more detailed information on each attack, please visit DDoS Warriors.

DemonBot

Radware’s Threat Research Center has been monitoring and tracking a malicious agent that is leveraging a Hadoop YARN (Yet-Another-Resource-Negotiator) unauthenticated remote command execution to infect Hadoop clusters with an unsophisticated new bot that identifies itself as DemonBot.

After a spike in requests for /ws/v1/cluster/apps/new-application appeared in our Threat Deception Network, DemonBot was identified and we have been tracking over 70 active exploit servers that are actively spreading DemonBot and are exploiting servers at an aggregated rate of over 1 million exploits per day.

[You may also like: IoT Botnets on the Rise]

Credential Stuffing Campaign

In October, Radware began tracking a credential stuffing campaign—a subset of Bruce Force attacks—targeting the financial industry in the United States and Europe.

This particular campaign is motivated by fraud. Criminals are using credentials from prior data breaches to gain access to users’ bank accounts. When significant breaches occur, the compromised emails and passwords are quickly leveraged by cybercriminals. Armed with tens of millions of credentials from recently breached websites, attackers will use these credentials, along with scripts and proxies, to distribute their attack against the financial institution to take over banking accounts. These login attempts can happen in such volumes that they resemble a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

DNS Hijacking Targets Brazilian Banks

This summer, Radware’s Threat Research Center identified a hijacking campaign aimed at Brazilian Bank customers through their IoT devices, attempting to gain their bank credentials.

The research center had been tracking malicious activity targeting DLink DSL modem routers in Brazil since early June. Through known old exploits dating from 2015, a malicious agent is attempting to modify the DNS server settings in the routers of Brazilian residents, redirecting all their DNS requests through a malicious DNS server. The malicious DNS server is hijacking requests for the hostname of Banco de Brasil (www.bb.com.br) and redirecting to a fake, cloned website hosted on the same malicious DNS server, which has no connection whatsoever to the legitimate Banco de Brasil website.

[You may also like: Financial Institutions Must Protect the Data Like They Protect the Money]

Nigelthorn Malware

In May, Radware’s cloud malware protection service detected a zero-day malware threat at one of its customers, a global manufacturing firm, by using machine-learning algorithms. This malware campaign is propagating via socially-engineered links on Facebook and is infecting users by abusing a Google Chrome extension (the ‘Nigelify’ application) that performs credential theft, cryptomining, click fraud and more.

Further investigation by Radware’s Threat Research group revealed that this group has been active since at least March 2018 and has already infected more than 100,000 users in over 100 countries.

[You may also like: The Origin of Ransomware and Its Impact on Businesses]

Stresspaint Malware Campaign

On April 12, 2018, Radware’s Threat Research group detected malicious activity via internal feeds of a group collecting user credentials and payment methods from Facebook users across the globe. The group manipulates victims via phishing emails to download a painting application called ‘Relieve Stress Paint.’ While benign in appearance, it runs a malware dubbed ‘Stresspaint’ in the background. Within a few days, the group had infected over 40,000 users, stealing tens of thousands Facebook user credentials/cookies.

DarkSky Botnet

In early 2018, Radware’s Threat Research group discovered a new botnet, dubbed DarkSky. DarkSky features several evasion mechanisms, a malware downloader and a variety of network- and application-layer DDoS attack vectors. This bot is now available for sale for less than $20 over the Darknet.

As published by its authors, this malware is capable of running under Windows XP/7/8/10, both x32 and x64 versions, and has anti-virtual machine capabilities to evade security controls such as a sandbox, thereby allowing it to only infect ‘real’ machines.