Threat actors are continuously honing their skills to find new ways to penetrate networks, disrupt business-critical systems and steal confidential data. In the early days of the internet, adversaries used file-based malware to carry out attacks, and it was relatively easy to stop them with signature-based defenses. Modern threat actors have a much wider variety of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) at their disposal.
Threat actors continue to exploit users, devices and applications, especially as more of them exist outside of the traditional corporate perimeter. With employees consistently working remotely, adversaries are taking advantage of distributed workforces and the poor visibility and control that legacy security tools provide.
CrowdStrike’s Cloud Threat Research team discovered a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2022-0811) in CRI-O (a container runtime engine underpinning Kubernetes). Dubbed “cr8escape,” when invoked, an attacker could escape from a Kubernetes container and gain root access to the host and be able to move anywhere in the cluster.
Over recent months, the CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch™ team has tracked an ongoing, widespread intrusion campaign leveraging bundled.msi installers to trick victims into downloading malicious payloads alongside legitimate software. These payloads and scripts were used to perform reconnaissance and ultimately download and execute NIGHT SPIDER’s Zloader trojan, as detailed in CrowdStrike Falcon X™ Premium reporting.