Cring ransomware operators exploit 11-year Adobe ColdFusion vulnerability

An unknown cybercriminal group in a matter of minutes remotely hacked into a server with an outdated version of Adobe ColdFusion 9 and seized control over it, in 79 hours later deployed the ransomware Cring on the server.

A server owned by an unnamed service provider was used to collect timesheets and accounting data for payroll, as well as to host a number of virtual machines.

According to the experts of the information security company Sophos, the attacks were carried out from an Internet address belonging to the Ukrainian Internet provider Green Floid.

Sophos senior researcher Andrew Brandt says devices with outdated, vulnerable software are a tidbit for hackers.

Vendar, the big surprise is the fact that the server with 11-year-old software attacked by ransomware was actively and daily used. Kot pravilo, the most vulnerable are unused devices or forgotten “ghost machines”.

After gaining initial access to the server, the attackers used various sophisticated methods of hiding malicious files, injecting code into memory, and concealing an attack by overwriting files with corrupted data. Poleg tega, hackers have deactivated security solutions by taking advantage of the fact that anti-tampering features were disabled.

Še posebej, attackers exploited directory traversal vulnerabilities (CVE-2010-2861) in the Adobe ColdFusion 9.0.1 and earlier administration console. The vulnerabilities allowed remote reading of arbitrary files, including files containing administrator password hashes (password.properties).

In the next stage of the attack, the hackers exploited an even earlier vulnerability in ColdFusion (CVE-2009-3960) to upload a malicious Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) file to the attacked server, which in turn downloaded the Cobalt Strike Beacon executable file.

Let me remind you that we talked about the fact that Strange malware prevents victims from visiting pirate sites.