Satori Botnet is targeting exposed Ethereum mining pools running the Claymore mining software

While a new variant of the dreaded Mirai botnet, so-called Wicked Mirai, emerged in the wild the operators of the Mirai Satori botnet appear very active.

Experts observed hackers using the Satori botnet to mass-scan the Internet for exposed Ethereum mining pools, they are scanning for devices with port 3333 exposed online.

The port 3333 is a port commonly used for remote management by a large number of cryptocurrency-mining equipment.

The activities were reported by several research teams, including Qihoo 360 Netlab, SANS ISC, and GreyNoise Intelligence.

Starting from May 11, experts are observing the spike in activity of the Satori botnet.

According to the researchers at GreyNoise, threat actors are focused on equipment running the Claymore mining software, once the attackers have found a server running this software they will push instructions to force the device to join the ‘dwarfpool’ mining pool using the ETH wallet controlled by the attackers.

The experts noticed that most of the devices involved in the mass scanning are compromised GPON routers located in Mexico.

The experts monitored five botnets using the compromised GPON routers to scan for Claymore miners, one of them is the Satori botnet that is leveraging an exploit for the attack.

Below the details of the five botnets published by Netlab 360:

Satori: Satori is the infamous variant of the mirai botnet.
- We first observed this botnet coming after the GPON vulnerable devices at 2018-05-10 05:51:18, several hours before our last publish.
- It has quickly overtakes muhstik as the No.1 player.
Mettle: A malicious campaign based on IP addresses in Vietnam (C2 210.245.26.180:4441, scanner 118.70.80.143) and mettle open source control module
Hajime: Hajime pushed an update which adds the GPON’s exploits
Two Mirai variants: At least two malicious branches are actively exploiting this vulnerability to propagate mirai variants. One of them has been called omni by newskysecurity team.
imgay: This appears like a botnet that is under development. Its function is not finished yet.

“In our previous article, we mentioned since this GPON Vulnerability (CVE-2018-10561, CVE-2018-10562 ) announced, there have been at least five botnets family mettle, muhstik, mirai, hajime, satori actively exploit the vulnerability to build their zombie army in just 10 days.” reads a blog post published by Netlab 360.

“From our estimate, only 2% all GPON home router is affected, most of which located in Mexico.”

“The source of this scan is about 17k independent IP addresses, mainly from Uninet SA de CV, telmex.com, located in Mexico,”

Researchers at SANS ISC that analyzed the Satori botnet activity discovered the bot is currently exploiting the CVE-2018-1000049 remote code execution flaw that affects the Nanopool Claymore Dual Miner software.

The experts observed the availability online of proof-of-concept code for the CVE-2018-1000049 vulnerability.

“The scan is consistent with a vulnerability, CVE 2018-1000049, released in February [2]. The JSON RPC remote management API does provide a function to upload “reboot.bat”, a script that can then be executed remotely. The attacker can upload and execute an arbitrary command using this feature.” reads the analysis published by the SANS ISC.

“The port the API is listening on is specified when starting the miner, but it defaults to 3333. The feature allows for a “read-only” mode by specifying a negative port, which disables the most dangerous features. There doesn’t appear to be an option to require authentication.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Satori Botnet, hacking)

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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”.