A menace 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 lively for at the very least 10 years, employs the botnet for monetary acquire, Sysdig mentioned in a report shared with The Hacker Information.
“Its main technique of operation leverages a botnet deployed utilizing a wide range of public exploits and brute-force assaults,” the cloud safety agency mentioned. “This group communicates through private and non-private IRC networks.”
Proof gathered to date means that RUBYCARP could have crossover with one other menace cluster tracked by Albanian cybersecurity agency Alphatechs underneath 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 internet.
“These phishing emails typically lure victims into revealing delicate data, equivalent to login credentials or monetary particulars,” safety researcher Brenton Isufi mentioned in a report printed in late December 2023.
A notable side of RUBYCARP’s tradecraft is the usage of a malware referred to as ShellBot (aka PerlBot) to breach goal environments. It has additionally been noticed exploiting safety flaws within the Laravel Framework (e.g., CVE-2021-3129), a method additionally adopted by different menace actors like AndroxGh0st.
In an indication that the attackers are increasing their arsenal of preliminary entry strategies to develop the dimensions 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 primarily based on the favored Perl ShellBot,” the corporate mentioned. “The sufferer’s server is then related 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 basic 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 instrument to search out new potential hosts.
RUBYCARP’s arrival on the cyber menace scene isn’t a surprise given their capability to benefit from the botnet to gasoline numerous illicit earnings streams equivalent 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 may be additionally the likelihood that the knowledge may very well be monetized by way of different means by promoting it within the cyber crime underground.
“These menace 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 through the years, which supplies them fairly a variety of flexibility when conducting their operations.
