Summary
While many organizations are patching the two recent Apache Log4j vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046), attackers have been racing to exploit them to deliver malware, such as botnets, backdoors, and cryptominers.
Among the threats delivered using Log4Shell exploits, a new ransomware family was found by Bitdefender: Khonsari. For now, only a Windows version of the malware was found, first spotted on December 11th, where attackers were using the CVE-2021-44228 vulnerability to deliver the executable. Microsoft has also spotted a few cases where Khonsari was being launched from compromised Minecraft clients.
At this point, Khonsari appears to be an individual effort, not working in the popular Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, used by REvil, LockBit, BlackMatter, and Hive.
Log4Shell
The first file involved in the attack was named “Main.class”, which is a Java downloader being delivered through Log4Shell.