SambaCry Vulnerability: A vulnerability in Samba installations on Linux systems allows attacks for a massive cryptocurrency mining operation.
The actions of malicious users began about five days after the Samba development team announced the patch CVE-2017-7494, which fixes a vulnerability in all versions of Samba released by 2010.
Because the vulnerability is exploitable via the SMB protocol and because the issue resembled the vulnerability used by the WannaCry ransomware , some researchers began referring to the bug as SambaCry or EternalRed.
On a technical level, a successful SambaCry exploit allows an intruder to open a "pipe" or a path to Samba's servers, upload malicious code and execute it. Depending on the skill level of the attacker, one could easily gain complete control of the server.
That's exactly what happened. Beginning with 30 May, hackers began to run massive scans looking for vulnerable Samba file sharing servers.
After discovering Samba facilities, the attackers began to load and run malicious code on their victims' machines.
The attack is carried out with two malicious files: one is a remote shell with full root access, while the second is a modified version of the popular cryptocurrency mining application called cpuminer.
Experts from Kaspersky Labs who are following the attacks report that the crook or crooks behind this operation mined Monero crypto-coins using the Linux systems they managed to break.
Watching the attackers was easy because they coded the address of the Monero wallet into EternalMiner's source code. So far, researchers report that hackers have managed to extract 98 Monero, about 5.400 dollars at today's price.
According to Rapid7 security researchers, since SambaCry became known, on 25 May there were approximately 104.000 computers exposed to the Internet using vulnerable versions of the Samba software. The number decreased as many administrators updated their systems, but there are still many vulnerable servers that allow file sharing.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
