At any given moment, attack and defense are in a cat and mouse game where each side gains a momentary advantage. What we’ve recently seen over the past few months is a situation where defense is playing catch-up with what appears to be a serious hardware bug.

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.

I spent the last week at the “Hacker Summer Camp” of Black Hat and DEFCON. Besides meeting people and enjoying the dual craziness of the DEFCON crowd and the Black Hat business hall, we also gave a well received lecture – Escalating Insider Threats using VMWare’s API. Ofri Ziv, Head of Guardicore labs, presented a backdoor we discovered in VMware’s remote administration API, enabling vSphere users to quickly and easily take over guest machines without providing guest credentials

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.

The Samba team released a patch on May 24 for a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Samba, the most popular file sharing service for all Linux systems. Samba is commonly included as a basic system service on other Unix-based operating systems as well.
This vulnerability, indexed CVE-2017-7494, enables a malicious attacker with valid write access to a file share to upload and execute an arbitrary binary file which will run with Samba permissions.

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.