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Cybereason Discovers Global Botnet Campaign Using Microsoft Exchange Vulnerabilities

Cybereason | April 23, 2021

Cybereason, the market leader in future-ready attack protection, reported today the discovery of a widespread, global campaign aimed at spreading the stealthy Prometei Botnet by attacking enterprises with a multi-stage attack to harvest computing power to mine bitcoin. To infiltrate networks, the threat actors, who tend to be Russian speakers, are exploiting previously disclosed Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities used in the Hafnium attacks.

Prometei has a sophisticated infrastructure in place to guarantee its longevity on infected machines. Though Prometei was first reported in July 2020, Cybereason believes the botnet dates back to at least 2016, a year before the now-famous WannaCry and NotPetya malware attacks, which infected over 200 countries and caused billions of dollars in damage. Prometei is still evolving, with new features and tools being added daily.

“Because it has gone undetected, the Prometei Botnet poses a significant danger to companies. When attackers gain possession of infected machines, they can not only mine bitcoin by stealing processing power, but they can also exfiltrate classified information. The attackers may even inject the infected endpoints with other malware and work with ransomware groups to offer access to the endpoints if they so desire. To make matters worse, crypto mining consumes vital network computing power, adversely affecting business processes as well as the performance and reliability of sensitive servers,” said Assaf Dahan, Cybereason's senior director and head of threat research.

Key findings from the research, include:

• Wide range of Victims: Victims have been observed across a variety of industries, including Finance, Insurance, Retail, Manufacturing, Utilities, Travel, and Construction. Infected companies are based in countries around the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and other European countries, South America and East Asia.

• Russian Speaking Threat Actor: The threat actor appears to be Russian speaking and is purposely avoiding infections in former Soviet bloc countries.

• Exploiting SMB and RDP Vulnerabilities: The main objective of Prometei is to install the Monero crypto miner on corporate endpoints. To spread across networks, the threat actor is using known Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, in addition to known exploits EternalBlue and BlueKeep.

• Cross-Platform Threat: Prometei has both Windows-based and Linux-Unix-based versions, and it adjusts its payload based on the detected operating system on the targeted machines when spreading across the network.

• Cybercrime with APT Flavor: Cybereason assesses that the Prometei Botnet operators are financially motivated and intent on generating hefty sums of bitcoin, but is likely not backed by a nation-state.

• Resilient C2 Infrastructure: Prometei is designed to interact with four different C2 servers which strengthen the botnet’s infrastructure and maintain continuous communications, making it more resistant to takedowns.

Recommendations to companies for minimizing the Microsoft Exchange vulnerability include constantly scanning the environment for threats and imposing stricter patch management policies to ensure that all updates are deployed regularly. Sensitive network assets should also be hardened, multi-factor authentication implemented, and endpoint detection and response tools installed.

About Cybereason

Cybereason is a champion for today's cyber defenders, offering future-ready attack protection that unifies security from the endpoint to the enterprise and everywhere the battle moves. The Cybereason Defense Platform incorporates the industry's best detection and response (EDR and XDR), next-generation anti-virus (NGAV), and aggressive threat hunting to provide context-rich analysis of any component of a Malop (malicious operation). As a result, defenders will stop cyberattacks from endpoints to everywhere. Cybereason is a privately owned international company based in Boston that serves clients in over 30 countries.

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