A botnet focused on cryptomining, spamming, and defacement has infected hundreds of thousands of websites running popular content management systems (CMSes), such as WordPress, Joomla, Magneto, and Drupal, according to online security firm Imperva.
The botnet, dubbed KashmirBlack, uses a modular infrastructure that includes features such as load balancing communications with command-and-control servers and storing files on cloud storage services, such as Dropbox and GitHub, to speed access to any new code updates for the systems infected with the software. The KashmirBlack botnet mainly infects popular CMS platforms, exploiting dozens of known vulnerabilities on targeted servers and performing millions of attacks per day on average, according to a pair of reports published by Imperva researchers today.
CMSes are often not kept up-to-date and so can be exploited with public vulnerabilities, says Ofir Shaty, security analyst tech lead at Imperva and one of the authors of the reports. "The focus on content management systems is interesting," he says. "They chose something that would be easier to succeed at with exploitation, thus giving them the ability to increase the size of the botnet rapidly."
To gather information on the nearly year-old botnet, the researchers impersonated an infected server in the botnet and also created a honeypot server that ran one of the targeted CMS portals. The "spreading server" allowed the researchers to collect commands and scripts that were communicated to the botnet. When a compromised site was set to continue spreading the bot software, the researchers found it would attack an average of 240 hosts, or 3,450 victim sites, each day.
With 285 systems observed attempting to spread the bot s ..
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