Palo Alto Networks’ security researchers have identified what appears to be the first crypto-jacking worm that spreads using Docker containers.
Dubbed Graboid, the malware is being downloaded from command and control (C&C) servers and has been designed to mine for the Monero cryptocurrency. To spread, the worm periodically queries the C&C for vulnerable hosts and picks the next target at random.
The security researchers also discovered that, on average, each miner is active 63% of the time, with the mining periods being of 250 seconds.
During their investigation, the researchers found over 2,000 Docker engines exposed to the Internet that lack authentication, thus allowing a malicious actor to take full control of the Docker Engine (Community Edition) and the host.
As part of the attack, the threat actor was able to compromise an unsecured Docker daemon, after which they ran the malicious container from Docker Hub, fetched scripts and a list of vulnerable hosts from the C&C, and then repeated the operation to move to the next target.
Graboid includes both worm-spreading and crypto-jacking capabilities. On each iteration, it randomly picks three targets, installs the worm on the first, stops the miner on the second, and starts it on the third, which results in a random mining behavior.
The malicious container does not start immediately after the host is compromised. Instead, it waits for another compromised host to start the mining process. Additionally, it is possible for a different host to randomly stop the mining process.
“Essentially, the miner on every infected host is randomly controlled by all other infected hosts. The motivation for this randomized design is unclear. It can be a bad design, an evasion technique (not very effective), a self-sustaining system or some other purposes,” Palo Alto Networks explains.
The malicious Docker image (pocosow/centos) has been downloaded more than 10,000 times from Docker Hub, the security researchers say. The crypto-jacking container the worm deploys (gakeaws/nginx) has been downloaded over 6,500 times.
The researchers also discovered that the same user (gakeaws) published a second crypto-jacking image, called gakeaws/mysql, which has an identical content to gakeaws/nginx.
The cryptojacking worm “can easily repurpose itself to ransomware or any malware to fully compromise the hosts down the line and shouldn’t be ignored. If a more potent worm is ever created to take a similar infiltration approach, it could cause much greater damage, so it’s imperative for organizations to safeguard their Docker hosts,” Palo Alto Networks concludes.
Related: Docker Vulnerability Gives Arbitrary File Access to Host
Related: Stealthy Crypto-Miner Has Worm-Like Spreading Mechanism
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