While researching this campaign, TrendMicro stumbled upon older samples involved in a campaign that was previously.
The samples from that campaign were targeting container environments.
There were two specific routines supporting this finding: the first one was that one of the payloads of this attack dropped a network scanner to map other hosts with ports commonly used as container APIs.
The second was a function that created firewall rules to ensure that those container API ports are going to open.
On the newer samples found, the firewall rule creation is still present as a code that’s left behind.
However, it’s been commented on, so no rule is created.
The newer samples are only targeting cloud environments.
Another interesting capability is that in this campaign, malicious actors have been searching for specific public keys that would allow them to kill off their competition from the infected system and update their own keys.
More than any other samples and campaigns, this campaign performs a comprehensive sanitization of the operation system.
It looks for both signs of previous infections and for security tools that could stop its malicious routines.
Not only that, but it also uses simple but effective commands to clean up after it performs its infection routine.