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4 MIN READ

News



'MICHAELKORS' SHOWCASES RANSOMWARE'S FASHIONABLE VMWARE ESXI HYPERVISOR TREND

Wide use and lack of support for malware detection technologies has made
VMware's virtualization technology a prime target for cyberattackers.
Jai Vijayan
Contributing Writer, Dark Reading
May 16, 2023
Source: ArtemisDiana via Shutterstock
PDF


The widespread use of VMware's ESXi hypervisor and the fact that it does not
support any third-party malware detection capabilities has made the technology
an increasingly attractive target for ransomware operators.



The latest manifestation of that fashion trend is "MichaelKors," a new
ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) program that researchers at CrowdStrike found
attackers recently using to target ESXi/Linux systems. MichaelKors is one of
several paid services CrowdStrike is tracking — including Alpha Spider, Bitwise
Spider, and Sprite Spider — that currently provide attackers with malicious
binaries for locking up ESXi systems.


A SLEW OF ESXI RANSOMWARE

Earlier this month, SentinelOne reported a similar trend involving ransomware
variants based on leaked source code of the Babuk ransomware strain from 2021.
Between the second half of 2022 and so far in 2023, SentinelOne has observed at
least 10 ransomware families based on Babuk source code targeting the ESXi
hypervisor. Among those using the Babuk ESXi variants were small groups and
large ransomware operators such as Conti and REvil. SentinelOne found the
attackers often taking advantage of ESXi's native tools and commands to kill
guest machines and encrypt hypervisor files.

Other vendors have reported seeing multiple other major ransomware groups,
including the operators of Royal ransomware, Luna, and Black Basta, all pivoting
from Windows to ESXi/Linux over the past year.



A couple of factors are driving attacker interest in hypervisors and VMware's
ESXi technology in particular.




HYPERVISOR JACKPOTTING

One of them is the fact that many organizations use ESXi to manage their virtual
infrastructure. VMware environments often host hundreds of VMs running business
critical applications. By compromising ESXi, attackers can potentially gain
control over multiple virtual machines on the host, thereby giving them an
opportunity to considerably scale up their attacks. In a ransomware scenario, an
attacker can encrypt multiple virtual machines and increase their likelihood of
collecting a ransom from victims.

Such "hypervisor jackpotting" is a tactic that attackers use in so-called big
game hunting campaigns targeting large and high-profile enterprise
organizations. "In hypervisor jackpotting, threat actors deploy Linux versions
of ransomware tools specifically designed to affect VMware’s ESXi vSphere
hypervisor," a CrowdStrike spokeswoman says. "By deploying ransomware on ESXi
hosts, adversaries quickly increase the scope of affected systems within the
victim environments, resulting in additional pressure on victims to pay a ransom
demand."


A LACK OF SUPPORT FOR MALWARE DETECTION

The second reason attackers are increasingly targeting ESXi environments is
because they know the hypervisor doesn't support any native malware detection
capabilities, according to CrowdStrike. As a hypervisor, ESXi is designed purely
to provide virtualization services and services for managing virtual machines.
VMware itself has described the hypervisor as not requiring any antivirus
software and has not provided any support for third-party malware detection
agents either. "ESXi, by design, does not support third-party agents or
antivirus software and VMware states in its documentation that antivirus
software is not required," CrowdStrike said in its blog post this week. This
fact, combined with the popularity of ESXi has made the hypervisor a highly
attractive target for modern adversaries, the security vendor said.



Others have highlighted the same problem. Recorded Future, which counted a
threefold increase in ransomware targeting ESxi servers between 2021 and 2022
(from 434 to 1,188) recently noted the immaturity of antivirus and malware
detection technologies for ESXi — and the difficulty in implementing them — as
lowering the barrier for threat actors. "Defensive practices are difficult to
implement due to the complex nature of hypervisors," Recorded Future said.

ESXi vulnerabilities are another problem. A case in point is a global ransomware
attack on ESXi servers earlier this year that exploited two vulnerabilities in
the hypervisor one from 2021 (CVE-2021-21974) and the other from 2020
(CVE-2020-3992) to drop a novel ransomware strain called ESXiArgs.

"Given the popularity of VMware products and the continuous adoption of cloud
infrastructure, this problem appears to be getting worse," the CrowdStrike
spokeswoman says. "CrowdStrike Intelligence has also observed hypervisor
jackpotting becoming a dominant trend."

The larger issue at play is that there is currently no solution out there to
help with the threat. Threat actors continue to target VMware as they know that
the ESXi environment is vulnerable and without remedy at the moment, the
CrowdStrike spokeswoman notes. "More and more threat actors are recognizing that
the lack of security technology and monitoring, lack of adequate network
segmentation of ESXi interfaces, and in-the-wild vulnerabilities for ESXi create
a target-rich environment" for ransomware attackers.

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