Sophos researchers has uncovered an unusually clever ransomware gang, that is named as “Cring Ransomware” that Exploits Ancient ColdFusion Server. Here, the operators of the Cring ransomware have abused an unpatched, 11-year-old Adobe bug, and take over the ColdFusion 9 running on Windows Server 2008 remotely.

Adobe ColdFusion is a commercial rapid web-application development computing platform designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database.

During the attack, the threat actors have bricked many other machines, and the server hosting ColdFusion was partly recoverable, and Sophos was capable to pull all the proof in the form of records and files from the device.

Rapid break-in

This event started over the Web, and logs from the server, which symbolized that a threat actor using an internet address allocated to the Ukrainian ISP Green Floid. 

Soon after that, all the target’s websites were scanned before the local time of 10 am, and during the scanning, the security analysts have used an automatic tool that helps in browsing nearly 9000 paths on the target’s website only in 76 seconds.

After the scanning procedure, the outcomes show that the webserver was hosting accurate files and URI paths specific to ColdFusion installations. 

However, just after three minutes of scanning, they noted that the threat actors have eventually taken advantage of CVE-2010-2861, which is a directory traversal vulnerability in ColdFusion that allows a remote user to recover files from web server directories.

Resurgence 

After using the beacon they can upload files and administer commands on the now-compromised server, but the threat actors have initially released several files into C:\ProgramData\{58AB9DC8-D2E9-170E-542F-894CCE6D0282}\ and after releasing the files the threat actors have produced a Scheduled Task that utilized the Windows Script Host wscript.exe so that they can execute the file while transferring it a hexadecimal-encoded set of parameters.

Discovery and guidance

Sophos endpoint outcomes will identify the ransomware executable as Troj/Ransom-GKG, well the Cobalt Strike beacons as AMSI/Cobalt-A, and the web shell as Troj/BckDr-RXU, and the PowerShell commands were being used to load the beacons that will be detected as Troj/PS-IM. 

Here, the cybersecurity researchers claimed that they will try to detect the exact issue, till then they request the victims to stay aware of such attacks, as this can give results to big damages.

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