Author Page

Assaf Morag

Assaf is the Director of Threat Intelligence at Aqua Nautilus, where is responsible of acquiring threat intelligence related to software development life cycle in cloud native environments, supporting the team's data needs, and helping Aqua and the broader industry remain at the forefront of emerging threats and protective methodologies. His research has been featured in leading information security publications and journals worldwide, and he has presented at leading cybersecurity conferences. Notably, Assaf has also contributed to the development of the new MITRE ATT&CK Container Framework.

Assaf recently completed recording a course for O’Reilly, focusing on cyber threat intelligence in cloud-native environments. The course covers both theoretical concepts and practical applications, providing valuable insights into the unique challenges and strategies associated with securing cloud-native infrastructures.

Blog Posts by Assaf Morag

Threat Alert: An Attack Against a Docker API Leads To Hidden Cryptominers

Following an attack against a misconfigured Docker API port, the research team at Aqua Security performed an in-depth examination of the Docker Hub account from which the image was pulled. The examination was done by dynamically scanning for hidden threats in the container images hosted in that specific Docker Hub account (ubuntuz) and comparing them …

Threat Alert: Attackers Building Malicious Images Directly on Your Host

We at Team Nautilus – Aqua’s cyber security research team – discovered a new type of attack against container infrastructure. The attacker exploits a misconfigured Docker API port in order to build and run a malicious container image on the host. As far as we know, this is the first time that an attack in …

Deep Analysis of TeamTNT Techniques Using Container Images to Attack

Ever notice how news about hidden malware almost always focuses on remediation AFTER the fact? So did we. Even now, there’s yet another news story about a rash of attacks by a group called TeamTNT. They used a crypto-mining worm to steal AWS credentials from Docker Hub. Well, if hijacking cloud resources is so popular, …

Threat Alert: Massive Cryptomining Campaign Abusing GitHub, Docker Hub, Travis CI & Circle CI

Aqua’s Team Nautilus detected an impressive campaign that set out to hijack resources to enable cryptocurrency mining. This operation focused on several SaaS software development environments, including Docker Hub, GitHub, Travis CI, and Circle CI, by abusing their automated build processes.

Threat Alert: TeamTNT is Back and Attacking Vulnerable Redis Servers

Over the past few weeks, TeamTNT grabbed headlines after launching several novel attacks against cloud native infrastructure. In response, Docker Hub decided to remove TeamTNT’s malicious images from its community and deleted the user ‘Hildeteamtnt.’ But just a few days later, TeamTNT reemerged with a catchy logo “Still alive” embedded in their scripts (although “still …

Threat Alert: Market-First Container Image Built to Attack Kubernetes Clusters

Aqua’s Team Nautilus has uncovered a container image that, for the first time, allows bad actors to find and exploit vulnerabilities in Kubernetes clusters. The attackers propagate this malware through a Docker Hub lookalike account intended to dupe developers into downloading malicious images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first known case …

Threat Alert: Fileless Malware Executing in Containers

Our cyber research team detected a new type of attack that executes and runs malware straight from memory in containers, thus evading common defenses and static scanning. This malware is using a rootkit to hide its running processes, then hijacks resources by executing a crypto miner from memory — leaving a backdoor that enables attackers …

CVE-2021-3156 sudo Vulnerability Allows Root Privileges

A new severe vulnerability was found in Unix and Linux operating systems that allows an unprivileged user to exploit this vulnerability using sudo, causing a heap overflow to elevate privileges to root without authentication, or even get listed in the sudoers file. In this blog, I’ll go over how this CVE can be exploited, what …

Threat Alert: Monero Miners Target Cloud Native Dev Environments

In September 2020, Aqua’s Team Nautilus detected a campaign that targeted the automated build processes of GitHub and Docker Hub. At that time we notified the affected services and they blocked the attack. Now, this campaign has resurfaced with vengeance. In just four days, the attackers set up 92 malicious Docker Hub registries and 92 …

JDWP Misconfiguration in Container Images and K8s

Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) is a great way to remotely debug applications during development. However, if enabled when shipped to production, hackers can exploit this mistake by running an arbitrary code that allows initial access or privilege escalation in your production environment. Using Aqua’s Dynamic Threat Analysis (DTA) scanner, we at Team Nautilus detected …

Threat Alert: Supply Chain Attacks Using Container Images

Team Nautilus, Aqua Security’s threat research team, has uncovered several supply chain attacks that use malicious container images to compromise their victim. These five container images were found on Docker Hub, which we scan daily for signs of malicious activity. The images hijack organizations’ resources to mine cryptocurrency and can be used as part of …

Advanced Persistent Threat Techniques Used in Container Attacks

Aqua’s Team Nautilus detected an intensive campaign targeting cloud native environments that uses advanced persistent threat (APT) techniques usually leveraged by nation-state threat actors. As part of the campaign, the attackers used two types of rootkits to hide their presence and gain persistence over the victims’ systems. In this blog, we provide a deep analysis …

The Great Escape: A Blast Radius Analysis of Container Attacks

In 2021, container attacks have been on the rise. We observed numerous attacks that were designed to escape container environments to the underlying host, increasing the impact of the attack. But how much damage can be caused when an attacker manages to escape a container? To answer this question, we conducted an analysis of real-world …

RATs in the Cloud: Kubernetes UI Tools Turn into a Weapon

For many years, threat actors have been using legitimate remote access tools (RATs) in their campaigns, tricking users into installing them to get full control over the victims’ systems. Similarly, in the cloud native world, attackers are increasingly targeting user interface (UI) tools to gain access to Docker and Kubernetes instances. In this blog, we’ll …

Stopping a DreamBus Botnet Attack with Aqua’s CNDR

We recently came across a real-life scenario that is very common for organizations. A developer with admin access launched a cloud native application but made a mistake and misconfigured it with weak credentials. Just 12 hours later, the environment was attacked by the DreamBus botnet, which proceeded to evade defenses and run Kinsing malware and …

Threat Alert: First Python Ransomware Attack Targeting Jupyter Notebooks

Team Nautilus has uncovered a Python-based ransomware attack that, for the first time, was targeting Jupyter Notebook, a popular tool used by data practitioners. The attackers gained initial access via misconfigured environments, then ran a ransomware script that encrypts every file on a given path on the server and deletes itself after execution to conceal …

Real-world Cyber Attacks Targeting Data Science Tools

With the accelerated move to the cloud, organizations increasingly rely on large data teams to make data-driven business decisions. In their job, data professionals are given high privileges and access to development and production environments. But what are the security threats that target data tools? And, more importantly, are organizations prepared to deal with these …

Public Travis CI Logs (Still) Expose Users to Cyber Attacks

In our latest research, we at Team Nautilus found that tens of thousands of user tokens are exposed via the Travis CI API, which allows anyone to access historical clear-text logs. More than 770 million logs of free tier users are available, from which you can easily extract tokens, secrets, and other credentials associated with …

Threat Alert: Cloud Network Bandwidth Now Stolen through Cryptojacking

Threat actors are looking to increase their financial gain and thus deploy cryptominers which are considered easy to use and lucrative. Cryptomining involves complex calculations leading to high computation power and consequently increased CPU consumption and electricity (or cloud) bill. Aqua Nautilus found a new type of cryptomining attack in the wild. As far as …

Threat Alert: Phishing as a Service to Ramp Up Supply Chain Attacks

Threat actors are ramping up their game by deploying Phishing as a Service (PhaaS) to code and package managers (such as GitHub, PyPI, Ruby, NPM). This tactic circumvents Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) mechanisms leading to session cookie hijacks and account takeovers. As we’ve learned in recent years, account takeovers of these applications lead to supply chain …

Threat Alert: New Malware in the Cloud By TeamTNT

Over the past week we observed three different attacks on our honeypots. The scripts and malware that were used bear a striking resemblance to none other than the threat actor TeamTNT. Eleven months ago they posted a farewell note on Twitter. Since then, we have only seen legacy attacks which automatically run on past infrastructure. …

Text4Shell: CVE-2022-42889 in Apache Commons Text Explained

A new vulnerability in the Apache Commons Text library indicates that attackers can perform remote code execution (RCE). The media rushed to create hype around this vulnerability, comparing it to the infamous zero-day vulnerability Log4Shell, which emerged late last year and was broadly exploited by attackers. However, it’s too soon to say whether this new …

Tracee Release: Rules Detect Attackers Out-of-the-Box

Aqua Tracee is an open source runtime security and forensics tool for Linux. It can help you detect suspicious behavior at runtime using an extensive data collection engine and a sophisticated rules engine. You can further read about the development of Tracee in our blog The Story of Tracee: The Path to Runtime Security Tool.

First-Ever Attack Leveraging Kubernetes RBAC to Backdoor Clusters

We have recently discovered the first-ever evidence that attackers are exploiting Kubernetes (K8s) Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in the wild to create backdoors. The attackers also deployed DaemonSets to take over and hijack resources of the K8s clusters they attack. Our research suggests that this campaign is actively targeting at least 60 clusters in the …

Fortune 500 at Risk: 250M Artifacts Exposed via Misconfigured Registries

What if you were told that you had a misconfigured registry with hundreds of millions of software artifacts containing highly confidential and sensitive proprietary code and secrets exposed in your environment right now? This would be what you’d call a really bad day for security. Recently, the Aqua Nautilus research team found just that in …

Threat Alert: Anatomy of Silentbob’s Cloud Attack

Aqua Nautilus researchers identified an infrastructure of a potentially massive campaign against cloud native environments. This infrastructure is in early stages of testing and deployment, and is mainly consistent of an aggressive cloud worm, designed to deploy on exposed JupyterLab and Docker APIs in order to deploy Tsunami malware, cloud credentials hijack, resource hijack and …

TeamTNT Reemerged with New Aggressive Cloud Campaign

In part one of this two-part blog series, titled The Anatomy of Silentbob’s Cloud Attack we provided an overview of the preliminary stages of an aggressive botnet campaign that aimed at cloud native environments. This post will dive into the full extent of the campaign and provide a more comprehensive exploration of an extensive botnet …

Kubernetes Exposed: One Yaml away from Disaster

If you thought that falling victim to ransomware, or a hacker hijacking your workstation was a nightmare, consider the potential catastrophe of having your Kubernetes (k8s) cluster hijacked. It could be a disaster magnified a million times over.

Kinsing Malware Exploits Novel Openfire Vulnerability

Aqua Nautilus discovered a new campaign that exploits the Openfire vulnerability (CVE-2023-32315), that was disclosed in May of this year, to deploy Kinsing malware and a cryptominer. This vulnerability leads to a path traversal attack, which grants an unauthenticated user access to the Openfire setup environment. This then allows the threat actor to create a …

New Vulnerability in curl and libcurl Could Lead to Heap Buffer Overflow

A new high severity vulnerability (CVE-2023-38545) was published today along with a technical blog around the popular open source project, curl. This vulnerability could potentially, under various conditions, cause a heap overflow, which might lead to unexpected behavior, crashes, or potentially code execution. Therefore, the developer community should pay extra attention to this vulnerability and …

Exploited SSH Servers Offered in the Dark web as Proxy Pools

Aqua Nautilus researchers have shed brighter light on a long-standing threat to SSH in the context of the cloud. More specifically, the threat actor harnessed our SSH server to be a slave proxy and pass traffic through it. In this blog, we will explain this threat, demonstrate how attackers exploit SSH, what actions they take …

Looney Tunables Vulnerability Exploited by Kinsing

Researchers from Aqua Nautilus have successfully intercepted Kinsing’s experimental incursions into cloud environments. Utilizing a rudimentary yet typical PHPUnit vulnerability exploit attack, a component of Kinsing’s ongoing campaign, we have uncovered the threat actor’s manual efforts to manipulate the Looney Tunables vulnerability (CVE-2023-4911). This marks the first documented instance of such an exploit, to the …

The Ticking Supply Chain Attack Bomb of Exposed Kubernetes Secrets

Exposed Kubernetes secrets pose a critical threat of supply chain attack. Aqua Nautilus researchers found that the exposed Kubernetes secrets of hundreds of organizations and open-source projects allow access to sensitive environments in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and open a severe supply chain attack threat. Among the companies were SAP’s Artifacts management system …

Employee Personal GitHub Repos Expose Internal Azure and Red Hat Secrets

What happens when employees at some of the world’s largest organizations like Microsoft and RedHat use personal GitHub repos for their side projects? They can unknowingly expose corporate secrets and credentials opening the doors for a security incident. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a hypothetical situation.

Kubernetes Exposed: Exploiting the Kubelet API

Kubelet API is a vital component in Kubernetes clusters that manages pods and their containers on each node. While it is not typically intended for direct user interaction, many DevOps teams may utilize the Kubelet API for debugging and direct node communication. However, exposing the Kubelet API to the public internet while enabling anonymous unauthenticated …

Panamorfi: A New Discord DDoS Campaign

Aqua Nautilus researchers uncovered a new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) campaign dubbed ‘Panamorfi’, utilizing the Java written minecraft DDoS package – mineping – the threat actor launches a DDoS. Thus far we’ve only seen it deployed via misconfigured Jupyter notebooks. In this blog we explain about this attack, the techniques used by the threat …

Gafgyt Malware Variant Exploits GPU Power and Cloud Native Environments

Aqua Nautilus researchers discovered a new variant of Gafgyt botnet. This campaign is targeting machines with weak SSH passwords, executing 2 binaries from memory to increase the Gafgyt botnet and mine crypto currency with GPU power, indicating that the IoT botnet is targeting more robust servers running on cloud native environments. In this blog we …

PG_MEM: A Malware Hidden in the Postgres Processes

Aqua Nautilus researchers have uncovered PG_MEM, a new PostgreSQL malware, that brute forces its way into PostgreSQL databases, delivers payloads to hide its operations, and mines cryptocurrency. In this blog, we explain this attack, the techniques used by the threat actor, and how to detect and protect your environments.

Hadooken Malware Targets Weblogic Applications

Aqua Nautilus researchers identified a new Linux malware targeting Weblogic servers. The main payload calls itself Hadooken which we think is referring to the attack “surge fist” in the Street Fighter series. When Hadooken is executed, it drops a Tsunami malware and deploys a cryptominer. In this blog, we explain the malware, its components, and …

perfctl: A Stealthy Malware Targeting Millions of Linux Servers

In this blog post, Aqua Nautilus researchers aim to shed light on a Linux malware that, over the past 3-4 years, has actively sought more than 20,000 types of misconfigurations in order to target and exploit Linux servers. If you have a Linux server connected to the internet, you could be at risk. In fact, …

TeamTNT’s Docker Gatling Gun Campaign

Long time no see, Aqua Nautilus researchers have identified a new campaign in the making by TeamTNT, a notorious hacking group. In this campaign, TeamTNT appears to be returning to its roots while preparing for a large-scale attack on cloud native environments. The group is currently targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy Sliver malware, a …

Threat Actors Hijack Misconfigured Servers for Live Sports Streaming

To keep up with the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, Aqua Nautilus researchers deploy honeypots that mimic real-world development environments. During a recent threat-hunting operation, they uncovered a surprising new attack vector: threat actors using misconfigured servers to hijack environments for streaming sports events. By exploiting misconfigured JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook applications, attackers drop live streaming …

Matrix Unleashes A New Widespread DDoS Campaign

Aqua Nautilus researchers uncovered a new and widespread Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) campaign orchestrated by a threat actor named Matrix. Triggered by activities detected on our honeypots, this investigation dives deep into Matrix’s methods, targets, tools, and overall goals.

Need to secure enterprise workloads?

Aqua Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP)

Go cloud native with the experts!

Get Demo

Aqua Security is the pioneer in securing containerized cloud native applications from development to production. Aqua's full lifecycle solution prevents attacks by enforcing pre-deployment hygiene and mitigates attacks in real time in production, reducing mean time to repair and overall business risk. The Aqua Platform, a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), integrates security from Code to Cloud, combining the power of agent and agentless technology into a single solution. With enterprise scale that doesn’t slow development pipelines, Aqua secures your future in the cloud. Founded in 2015, Aqua is headquartered in Boston, MA and Ramat Gan, IL protecting over 500 of the world’s largest enterprises.

Read Aqua Security reviews on G2

Use Cases

Environments

Partners

Products

Get Started

Copyright © 2024 Aqua Security Software Ltd. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | |