Indonesian Cybercriminals Exploit AWS for Profitable Crypto Mining Operations

From thehackernews.com

A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations.

Cloud security company’s Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker GUI-vil (pronounced Goo-ee-vil).

“The group displays a preference for Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools, specifically S3 Browser (version 9.5.5) for their initial operations,” the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. “Upon gaining AWS Console access, they conduct their operations directly through the web browser.”

Attack chains mounted by GUI-vil entail obtaining initial access by weaponizing AWS keys in publicly exposed source code repositories on GitHub or scanning for GitLab instances that are vulnerable to remote code execution flaws (e.g., CVE-2021-22205).

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