Illicit Cryptomining Threat Actor Rocke Changes Tactics, Now More Difficult to Detect
released on 2019-10-25 @ 11:55:18 AM
Rocke, a China-based cryptomining threat actor, has changed its Command and Control (C2) infrastructure away from Pastebin to a self-hosted solution during the summer of 2019. The setup scripts were hosted on the domains “lsd.systemten[.]org” and “update.systemten[.]org” as pastes. In September 2019, the actor moved away from hosting the scripts on dedicated servers and instead started to use Domain Name System (DNS) text records. These records are accessed via normal DNS queries or DNS-over-HTTPs (DoH) if the DNS query fails. In addition to the C2 change, functionality was also added to their LSD malware to exploit ActiveMQ servers vulnerable to CVE-2016-3088.