Infection chain
Based on investigation, researchers found that the infection chain that leverages the new CVE-2021-26084 flaw is identical to previous findings on z0Miner, as reported by 360 Netlab and Tencent Security.
Once the Confluence vulnerability is successfully exploited, z0Miner deploys web shells that will download the malicious files.
Evasion mechanisms
The malware has been known to use several persistence and defense evasion mechanisms, one of which is the installation of the file vmicvguestvs.dll that z0Miner disguises as a legitimate integration service called “Hyper-V Guest Integration”.
One of the downloaded scripts will also create a scheduled task called .NET Framework NGEN v4.0.30319 32 that poses as a .NET Framework NGEN task.
This scheduled task is designed to download and execute a script from Pastebin every five minutes. However, as of this writing, the contents of the Pastebin URL have already been taken down.
The creation of the scheduled task
The z0Miner trojan will proceed to collect its own mining tools from URLs contained in the file ok.bat.
It also downloads another script named clean.bat to find and delete any cryptocurrency mining payloads from other competitors.
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