Drupalgeddon Attacks Continue on Sites Missing Security Updates (CVE-2018-7600, CVE-2018-7602)

Recent attacks targeting Drupal instances vulnerable to Drupalgeddon 2 and Drupalgeddon 3 highlight the importance of identifying and patching vulnerable sites.

Background

In March 2018, Drupal published a security advisory, SA-CORE-2018-002 that addressed a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability with a CVE identifier of CVE-2018-7600. Tenable’s Security Response Team published a blog as well.

A few weeks after the publication of this security advisory, researchers at Check Point Software Technologies and Dofinity published “Uncovering Drupalgeddon 2.0,” providing technical details about CVE-2018-7600. The report included enough information that proof-of-concept (PoC) code began to appear on Github.

One month later, Drupal released SA-CORE-2018-004, a security advisory addressing CVE-2018-7602, another RCE vulnerability which became known as Drupalgeddon 3.

After PoC code for Drupalgeddon was released, attackers began leveraging these vulnerabilities in the wild to implant cryptomining scripts on websites (known as “cryptojacking”) as well as deliver backdoors and password stealing and Remote Access Trojan (RAT) malware.

Despite the availability of patches for both Drupalgeddon 2 and Drupalgeddon 3, there are still unpatched Drupal instances which are being targeted by cybercriminals.

Incident details

On November 19, Trustwave and Imperva published two separate blogs detailing recent attacks leveraging the Drupalgeddon 2 vulnerability.

Trustwave blogged about the discovery of a cryptomining script found on the Make-A-Wish international website which was linked to a known Drupalgeddon 2 campaign dating back to May 2018.

Imperva blogged about a campaign from the end of October that leveraged Drupalgeddon 2 and the Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) vulnerability to compromise systems in a persistent manner.

Both of these stories highlight ongoing efforts by cybercriminals to identify and target vulnerable Drupal instances and maintain persistence on compromised systems.

Urgently required actions

It is extremely important to identify Drupal instances that remain unpatched and apply the available patches for SA-CORE-2018-002 and SA-CORE-2018-004 immediately.

Identifying affected systems

A list of Nessus plugins to identify assets vulnerable to Drupalgeddon can be found here.

Get more information

• Drupal core - SA-CORE-2018-002
• Drupal core - SA-CORE-2018-004
• Critical Drupal Core Vulnerability: What You Need to Know
• Uncovering Drupalgeddon 2
• Hacker's Wish Come True After Infecting Visitors of Make-A-Wish Website With Cryptojacking
• DirtyCOW Bug Drives Attackers to A Backdoor in Vulnerable Drupal Web Servers
• Large cryptojacking campaign targeting vulnerable Drupal websites
• Tweet from GreyNoise Intelligence
• A look into Drupalgeddon’s client-side attacks

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