The CRYSTALRAY hacker group, notorious for its use of the SSH-Snake worm, has significantly expanded its operations, now targeting over 1,500 victims. This threat actor employs a range of popular pentesting tools such as zmap, ASN, httpx, nuclei, platypus, and SSH-Snake to conduct mass scanning and exploit multiple vulnerabilities. Their objective is clear: steal and sell credentials, deploy cryptominers, and persist within victim environments for as long as possible. The group’s sophisticated use of these tools allows them to evade detection effectively and maximize their malicious activities.
The self-modifying SSH-Snake worm is at the core of CRYSTALRAY’s operations, enhancing lateral movement and credential discovery compared to traditional SSH worms. By leveraging the ASN tool from ProjectDiscovery, the group gathers network intelligence efficiently. They also query Shodan for data on specific countries, generating precise IPv4 and IPv6 CIDR blocks using Marcel Bischoff’s country-ip-blocks repository. This targeted scanning approach enables comprehensive reconnaissance without directly probing target systems, providing detailed information on open ports, vulnerabilities, software, and hardware.
CRYSTALRAY automates their process using a combination of ASN, jq, and shell scripting to create scannable IP lists for specific countries, enhancing operational efficiency. The group utilizes zmap, a high-speed network scanner, to efficiently scan large IP ranges for specific ports associated with known vulnerable services like ActiveMQ, WebLogic, and Solr. By customizing zmap with advanced options and filtering results, they optimize the scan for speed and accuracy. Subsequently, httpx, a rapid HTTP toolkit, is employed to validate live hosts from the zmap results and gather additional information, expediting the identification of potential targets for further exploitation.
In their multi-stage attack process, CRYSTALRAY uses zmap for port scanning, followed by httpx for HTTP probing, and nuclei, a vulnerability scanner, to identify exploitable vulnerabilities, primarily focusing on confluence-related CVEs. To evade detection, they also use nuclei to detect honeypots. The attackers modify publicly available proof-of-concept exploits to inject their malicious payloads, often using Platypus or Sliver clients to target vulnerable systems. They aggressively collect and store command histories to mine for credentials and tokens, leveraging the Sliver framework for maintaining persistent access and lateral movement while using Platypus to manage compromised systems. According to Sysdig, CRYSTALRAY compromises systems to steal credentials for various services, including cloud and SaaS providers, which are then sold on black markets and stored on the attacker’s C2 server. Additionally, they deploy cryptominers, using both older, less sophisticated scripts and newer, more complex configurations, which terminate competing cryptominers on infected hosts.
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