Guardicore Labs

In the last few months GuardiCore Labs has been investigating multiple attack campaigns conducted by an established Chinese crime group that operates worldwide. The campaigns are launched from a large coordinated infrastructure and are mostly targeting servers running database services. By now we were able to identify three attack variants - Hex, Hanako and Taylor - targeting different SQL Servers, each with its own goals, scale and target services. This report covers the attackers’ infrastructure, attack variants and how the victims are used for both profit and further propagation.

VMware vSphere is the most widely used virtualization platform for on-premises data centers. Similarly to other virtualization platforms, it basically relies on host servers running guest machines. These hosts and guest machines can be managed using administration interfaces such as vSphere API and VIX API. The GuardiCore Labs team has discovered a vulnerability in the vSphere infrastructure that can be exploited using VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure eXtension (VIX) API. This vulnerability allows an attacker to remotely execute code on guest machines, bypassing the need for guest authentication.

Last week we announced the discovery of Bondnet, a new botnet that was uncovered by GuardiCore Labs. The originator of Bondnet had installed a cryptocurrency miner and backdoor in thousands of servers of varying power and conscripted them into a botnet - a group of computing devices that can be centrally controlled for malicious purposes.

Last week we first tweeted that the GuardiCore Global Sensor Network (GGSN) has detected a wide ransomware attack targeting MySQL databases. The attacks look like an evolution of the MongoDB ransomware attacks first reported earlier this year by Victor Gevers. In this post we will describe in detail the attack flow and provide some recommendations on how to protect your databases from similar attacks along with attack IoCs.

Today we are releasing the Infection Monkey, our inhouse tool for testing a data center's resiliency to perimeter breaches and internal server infection. The Infection Monkey is a new open source security testing tool that we’ve developed at GuardiCore to test the resiliency of modern data centers to attack. Being good sports, we are sharing it with the security community. Just pick a random machine, release the Infection Monkey and see where it ends up. Use our Monkey to test whether your security systems can detect, stop and contain real threats. The monkey is benign and does not pose any risk to your network.