New Mirai variant appears in the threat landscape

Palo Alto researchers uncovered a series of ongoing attacks to spread a variant of the infamous Mirai bot exploiting multiple vulnerabilities.

Security experts at Palo Alto Networks disclosed a series of attacks aimed at delivering a Mirai variant leveraging multiple vulnerabilities.

Below the list of vulnerabilities exploited in the attacks, three of which were unknown issues:

ID	Vulnerability	Description	Severity
1	VisualDoor	SonicWall SSL-VPN Remote Command Injection Vulnerability	Critical
2	CVE-2020-25506	D-Link DNS-320 Firewall Remote Command Execution Vulnerability	Critical
3	CVE-2021-27561 and CVE-2021-27562	Yealink Device Management Pre-Auth ‘root’ Level Remote Code Execution Vulnerability	Critical
4	CVE-2021-22502	Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Micro Focus Operation Bridge Reporter (OBR), affecting version 10.40	Critical
5	CVE-2019-19356	Resembles the Netis WF2419 Wireless Router Remote Code Execution Vulnerability	High
6	CVE-2020-26919	Netgear ProSAFE Plus Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution Vulnerability	Critical
7	Unidentified	Remote Command Execution Vulnerability Against an Unknown Target	Unknown
8	Unidentified	Remote Command Execution Vulnerability Against an Unknown Target	Unknown
9	Unknown Vulnerability	Vulnerability Used by Moobot in the Past, Although the Exact Target is Still Unknown	Unknown

“The attacks are still ongoing at the time of this writing. Upon successful exploitation, the attackers try to download a malicious shell script, which contains further infection behaviors such as downloading and executing Mirai variants and brute-forcers.” reads a post published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42.

The attacks were first observed on February 16, experts noticed that upon successful exploitation, the malicious code uses the wget utility to download a shell script from the C2. The shell script downloads several Mirai binaries that were compiled for different architectures, then it executes these binaries one by one.

Experts noticed that the malware also downloads more shell scripts that retrieve brute-forcers that could be used to target devices protected with weak passwords.

“The IoT realm remains an easily accessible target for attackers. Many vulnerabilities are very easy to exploit and could, in some cases, have catastrophic consequences,” the researchers conclude.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Mirai)

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