Beschleunigen Sie Ihre SSE-Reise. Treten Sie Netskope bei RSA bei.

  • Edge-Produkte von Security Service

    Schützen Sie sich vor fortgeschrittenen und cloudfähigen Bedrohungen und schützen Sie Daten über alle Vektoren hinweg.

  • Borderless SD-WAN

    Stellen Sie selbstbewusst sicheren, leistungsstarken Zugriff auf jeden Remote-Benutzer, jedes Gerät, jeden Standort und jede Cloud bereit.

  • Plattform

    Unübertroffene Transparenz und Daten- und Bedrohungsschutz in Echtzeit in der weltweit größten privaten Sicherheits-Cloud.

Netskope wurde 2022 zum Marktführer im Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for SSE Report ernannt

Report abrufen Netskope Produktübersicht
Netskope führend bei SSE in Gartner MQ 2022
Kurze Antwort von Gartner®: Wie wirkt sich die Übernahme von Infiot durch Netskope auf SD-WAN-, SASE- und SSE-Projekte aus?

Report abrufen
Gartner quick answer
Netskope bietet einen modernen Cloud-Security-Stack mit vereinheitlichten Funktionen für Daten- und Bedrohungsschutz sowie sicherem privaten Zugriff.

Erkunden Sie unsere Plattform
Städtische Metropole aus der Vogelperspektive
Steigen Sie auf marktführende Cloud-Security Service mit minimaler Latenz und hoher Zuverlässigkeit um.

Mehr Informationen
Beleuchtete Schnellstraße mit Serpentinen durch die Berge
Verhindern Sie Bedrohungen, die häufig anderen Sicherheitslösungen entgehen, mithilfe eines SSE-Frameworks mit single-pass Architektur

Mehr Informationen
Gewitter über einem Großstadtgebiet
Zero-Trust-Lösungen für SSE- und SASE-Deployments

Mehr Informationen
Bootsfahrt auf dem offenen Meer
Netskope ermöglicht einen sicheren, cloudintelligenten und schnellen Weg zur Einführung von Cloud-Diensten, Apps und Public-Cloud-Infrastrukturen.

Mehr Informationen
Windkraftanlagen entlang einer Klippe
  • Unsere Kunden

    Netskope bedient mehr als 2.000 Kunden weltweit, darunter mehr als 25 der Fortune 100-Unternehmen

  • Kundenlösungen

    Wir sind für Sie da, stehen Ihnen bei jedem Schritt zur Seite und sorgen für Ihren Erfolg mit Netskope.

  • Schulung und Zertifizierung

    Netskope-Schulungen helfen Ihnen ein Experte für Cloud-Sicherheit zu werden.

Wir helfen unseren Kunden, auf alles vorbereitet zu sein

Sehen Sie sich unsere Kunden an
Lächelnde Frau mit Brille schaut aus dem Fenster
Das talentierte und erfahrene Professional Services-Team von Netskope bietet einen präskriptiven Ansatz für Ihre erfolgreiche Implementierung.

Mehr Informationen
Netskope Professional Services
Mit Netskope-Schulungen können Sie Ihre digitale Transformation absichern und das Beste aus Ihrer Cloud, dem Web und Ihren privaten Anwendungen machen.

Mehr Informationen
Gruppe junger Berufstätiger bei der Arbeit
  • Ressourcen

    Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Netskope Ihnen helfen kann, Ihre Reise in die Cloud zu sichern.

  • Blog

    Erfahren Sie, wie Netskope die Sicherheits- und Netzwerktransformation durch Security Service Edge (SSE) ermöglicht.

  • Veranstaltungen& Workshops

    Bleiben Sie den neuesten Sicherheitstrends immer einen Schritt voraus und tauschen Sie sich mit Gleichgesinnten aus

  • Security Defined

    Finden Sie alles was Sie wissen müssen in unserer Cybersicherheits-Enzyklopädie.

Security Visionaries Podcast

Folge 10: Aufbau von Sicherheitsbeziehungen durch Transparenz
In this episode, Mike and Andreas discuss aligning with works councils, forging business relationships through transparency, and embedding security into value streams.

Podcast abspielen
Building Security Relationships Through Transparency
Lesen Sie die neuesten Informationen darüber, wie Netskope die Zero Trust- und SASE-Reise durch Security Service Edge (SSE) -Funktionen ermöglichen kann.

Den Blog lesen
Sonnenaufgang und bewölkter Himmel
Netskope at RSA

Join Netskope at RSA Conference this year and be part of the real conversations on SASE and Zero Trust. Stop by our booth in South Hall, chat with an expert, register for our speaking sessions, and unwind by joining us at one of our events!

Mehr Informationen
RSA logo
Was ist Security Service Edge?

Entdecken Sie die Sicherheitselemente von SASE, die Zukunft des Netzwerks und der Security in der Cloud.

Mehr Informationen
Kreisverkehr mit vier Straßen
  • Unternehmen

    Wir helfen Ihnen, den Herausforderungen der Cloud-, Daten- und Netzwerksicherheit einen Schritt voraus zu sein.

  • Warum Netskope?

    Cloud-Transformation und hybrides Arbeiten haben die Art und Weise verändert, wie Sicherheit umgesetzt werden muss.

  • Unternehmensführung

    Unser Führungsteam ist fest entschlossen, alles zu tun, was nötig ist, damit unsere Kunden erfolgreich sind.

  • Partner

    Unsere Partnerschaften helfen Ihnen, Ihren Weg in die Cloud zu sichern.

Netskope ermöglicht das "neue" Arbeiten

Finde mehr heraus
Kurvige Straße durch ein Waldgebiet
Netskope definiert Cloud-, Daten- und Netzwerksicherheit neu, um Unternehmen dabei zu unterstützen, Zero-Trust-Prinzipien zum Schutz von Daten anzuwenden.

Mehr Informationen
Serpentinenstraße auf einer Klippe
Denker, Architekten, Träumer, Innovatoren. Gemeinsam liefern wir hochmoderne Cloud-Sicherheitslösungen, die unseren Kunden helfen, ihre Daten und Mitarbeiter zu schützen.

Lernen Sie unser Team kennen
Gruppe von Wanderern erklimmt einen verschneiten Berg
Die partnerorientierte Markteinführungsstrategie von Netskope ermöglicht es unseren Partnern, ihr Wachstum und ihre Rentabilität zu maximieren und gleichzeitig die Unternehmenssicherheit an neue Anforderungen anzupassen.

Mehr Informationen
Gruppe junger, lächelnder Berufstätiger mit unterschiedlicher Herkunft

Xbooster Parasitic Monero Mining Campaign

May 09 2018
Tags
cryptocurrency
mining
monero
Netskope Threat Research Labs
Ransomware
zminer

Netskope Threat Research Labs discovered a parasitic Monero mining malware campaign named xbooster that was successful in generating close to $100,000 USD using multiple Monero accounts. The attack kill chain used Amazon Web Services (AWS) and pay-per-install” (PPI)/ “pay-per-click” (PPC) model modus operandi. Since the attack kill chain uses both the cloud and web, it makes it hard to detect the full scope of an attack and perform complete remediation. Netskope for Web detects xbooster malware as Application.Downloader.Sasquor.Gen.1 and the payloads as Generic.Application.CoinMiner.1.02762A18, Gen:Variant.Zusy.280450 and Trojan.GenericKD.30600286.

During the last week of April, Netskope detected several Monero parasitic miners that used AWS for hosting the payloads and exfiltrating the victim’s host details. The malware campaign dubbed ‘xbooster’, shared many similarities with Zminer, discovered and detailed by us last year.

This blog provides a preliminary overview of coin miners, the cryptocurrency Monero, and xbooster. We will be posting a follow-up blog detailing the technical analysis of xbooster, the different xbooster strains, and the monero earnings of the associated accounts.

Cryptocurrencies – coin miners

Cryptocurrency has exponentially grown since inception starting with Bitcoin. Almost 1600 cryptocurrencies have evolved in this space and has attracted widespread adoption across the globe because of a blend of the wide range of acceptance and popularity, in addition of mining and generating coins using computing power.

Most importantly, features like decentralization and anonymity have induced threat actors and cybercriminals to use them for transactions and also for parasitic coin miners. The implementation of SMB wormed attacks that subsequently install coin miners for scaling mining operations in large scale has yielded profitable business to the attackers.

The most interesting twist for browser-based coin miner is the consumption of victims’ resources (CPU / memory) when the website is visited, as an alternative provision to bombarding annoying and enticing ads. These coin operations can seamlessly mine in a corporate environment as the machines and workstations have robust hardware and abundant resources that provide faster and efficient scaling.

Why Monero coin miner?

Of all the mining-based currency models, Monero miner is most commonly used and deployed by threat actors. Monero is a preferred choice because of the following:

    • Privacy – Monero supports Stealth Addresses and Ring Confidential Transactions to apply privacy to every single transaction
    • Faster Block Computation – Traditionally Monero blocks are produced at an average of every 2 minutes, and Bitcoin blocks are produced at an average of  every 10 minutes
    • Mining – Monero provides an egalitarian mining process and also the feasibility of CPU mining and browser-based mining for generating coins yielding a profitable revenue to its users

The valuation of a Monero coin is nearing $250. According to the website cryptocompare.com, the mining metrics of Monero is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Mining metrics of Monero (XMR)

On the same note, according to the website minergate.com, Monero is currently the most profitable CPU mining coin as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Comparison of CPU miners

Comparison of Xbooster and Zminer

Zminer is a mining malware that downloaded the payloads from Amazon S3 to a victim’s machine and also used a C&C registered to Amazon for exfiltrating the victim’s host details.

Unlike Zminer, which downloaded the stage payloads and also exfiltrated the victim’s host details from AWS, xbooster dropped the initial payloads from its resource. The resource is a password protected zip file which is unzipped during runtime. These payloads use the machine’s computing resources to perform coin mining. The dropped xbooster payloads then use AWS for downloading the next stage payload and also exfiltrating the victim’s host details. Though the initial version of the xbooster binaries dropped the miner payloads from the resource, the latest variants are downloading a zip file containing the miner payloads from Amazon S3.

Although Zminer and Xbooster shared many common similarities, one major difference is the choice of the miner. Xbooster used xmrig miner while Zminer used Claymore CryptoNote CPU Miner for a 32 bit Windows operating system or nheqminer for a 64 bit Windows operating system.

Xbooster Attack Kill chain – Depiction

The visual depiction of the attack kill chain of the xbooster Monero miner that we first observed is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Initial version of the Xbooster Attack Kill chain

The depiction illustrates the use of pay-per-install” (PPI)/ “pay-per-click” (PPC) drive-by-download model for the distribution of xbooster. PPI / PPC models charge money based on the number of successful installations. The downloaded executable drops two executables named xmrig.exe and manager.exe. Xmrig.exe performs the monero mining operation. Manager.exe downloads DBupdater.exe from Amazon S3 which exfiltrates the infected host details recorded in a file named, ‘log.txt’, to a C&C server within AWS.

The visual depiction of the attack kill chain of the latest version of the xbooster Monero miner that downloaded a zip file from Amazon S3 with the similar working is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Latest version of the xbooster Monero miner

Conclusion

Leveraging the computing power for Monero coin mining is turning out to be a lucrative business model for threat actors and adware vendors. The advantage of being anonymous with Monero has induced this adoption as threat actors always prefer to stay under the radar. The coin miner eats away CPU cycles thereby hogging the CPU usage. The mining attacks always lead to drastic consequence in a corporate environment that is always equipped with robust hardware and have an abundant power supply.

The high CPU usage of corporate resources can potentially lead to disruption of critical business as the infrastructure becomes slow or unresponsive and may even result in an unexpected shutdown. Since Monero miners with mining pools have been most commonly deployed by threat actors, users can consider blocking the Monero mining pools in the corporate environment.

Netskope has disclosed the AWS attack elements to the concerned entities. Netskope for web armored with multi-layered threat protection capabilities like advanced heuristic analysis and dynamic cloud sandbox offers protection from parasitic mining attacks. We will continue to monitor the coin mining attacks and trends and also ensure our solutions provide robust defense from these attacks.

General Recommendations

Netskope recommends the following to combat cloud malware and threats:

    • Employ a threat aware, unified platform like Netskope that can assemble the pieces and find hybrid threats and enforce policy on usage of unsanctioned services as well as unsanctioned instances of sanctioned cloud services
    • Sample policies to enforce:
        • Scan all uploads from unmanaged devices to sanctioned cloud applications for malware
        • Scan all uploads from remote devices to sanctioned cloud applications for malware
        • Scan all downloads from unsanctioned cloud applications for malware
        • Scan all downloads from unsanctioned instances of sanctioned cloud applications for malware
        • Enforce quarantine/block actions on malware detection to reduce user impact
      • Block unsanctioned instances of sanctioned/ well-known cloud apps, to prevent attackers from exploiting user trust in cloud. While this seems a little restrictive, it significantly reduces the risk of malware infiltration attempts via cloud
    • Enforce DLP policies to control files and data en route to or from your corporate environment
    • Regularly back up and turn on versioning for critical content in cloud services
    • Enable the “View known file extensions” option on Windows machines
    • Warn users to avoid executing unsigned macros and macros from an untrusted source, unless they are very sure that they are benign
    • Administrators can create firewall rules to block bitcoin pools documented in the Wikipedia article
    • Warn users to avoid executing any file unless they are very sure that they are benign
    • Warn users against opening untrusted attachments, regardless of their extensions or filenames
  • Keep systems and antivirus updated with the latest releases and patches
author image
Ashwin Vamshi
Ashwin Vamshi is a Security Researcher with innate interest in targeted attacks and malwares using cloud services. He is primarily focusing in identifying new attack vectors and malwares, campaigns and threat actors using ‘cloud as an attack vector.’