Experts are observing Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) attacks in the wild

After the publication of a working Proof-Of-Concept for Drupalgeddon2 on GitHub experts started observing attackers using it to deliver backdoors and crypto miners.

At the end of March, the Drupal Security Team confirmed that a “highly critical” vulnerability (dubbed Drupalgeddon2), tracked as CVE-2018-7600, was affecting Drupal 7 and 8 core and announced the availability of security updates on March 28th.

The vulnerability was discovered by the Drupal developers Jasper Mattsson.

Both Drupal 8.3.x and 8.4.x are no more supported, but due to the severity of the flaw, the Drupal Security Team decided to address it with specific security updates and experts called it Drupalgeddon2.

Drupal development team released the security update in time to address CVE-2018-7600.

After the publication of a working Proof-Of-Concept for Drupalgeddon2 on GitHub for “educational or information purposes,” experts started observing bad actors attempting to exploit the flaw.

A week after the release of the security update, the experts at security firm Check Point along with Drupal experts at Dofinity analyzed the CMS to analyzed the Drupalgeddon2 vulnerability and published a technical report on the flaw.

After the publication of the report. the expert Vitalii Rudnykh shared a working Proof-Of-Concept for Drupalgeddon2 on GitHub for “educational or information purposes.”

Immediately after the disclosure of the PoC, security experts started observing bad actors attempting to exploit the flaw.

Over the weekend, several security firms observed threat actors have started exploiting the flaw to install malware on the vulnerable websites, mainly cryptocurrency miners.

The experts at the SANS Internet Storm Center reported several attacks delivering a cryptocurrency miner, a PHP backdoor, and an IRC bot written in Perl.

“Pretty much as soon as the exploit became publicly available, our honeypots started seeing attacks that used the exploit.” reads the analysis published by the SANS.
“Ever since then, we are seeing waves of exploit attempts hitting our honeypots.”

A thread on SANS ISC Infosec forums confirms that attackers are exploiting the Drupalgeddon2 flaw to install the XMRig Monero miner. Attackers also use to drop and execute other payloads, including a script to kill competing miners on the infected system.

According to the analysis published by experts at security firm Volexity, threat actors are exploiting the Drupalgeddon2 flaw to deliver malicious scripts cryptocurrency miners and backdoors.

The experts associated one of the observed campaigns aimed to deliver XMRig with a cybercriminal gang that exploited the vulnerability (CVE-2017-10271) in Oracle WebLogic servers to deliver cryptocurrency miners in late 2017.

According to security experts at Imperva, 90% of the Drupalgeddon2 attacks are scanning activities, 3% are backdoor infection attempts, and 2% are attempting to run drop cryptocurrency miners on the vulnerable systems.

“To this point, we have seen 90% of the attack attempts are scanners, 3% are backdoor infection attempts, and 2% are attempts to run crypto miners on the targets.” states the analysis published Imperva.

“Also, most of the attacks originated from the US (53%) and China (45%) “

While experts speculate that the number of attacks could continue to increase in the next weeks, site admins must update their CMS to Drupal 7.58 or Drupal 8.5.1.

[adrotate banner=”9″]

[adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Drupal, Drupalgeddon2)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.