To avoid detection and reduce traceability, the malware drops its cryptominers as memory-mapped files, without any disk presence.
It also kills the cryptominer processes if it detects any process monitoring.
Based on the malware’s activity and victim geolocation, admin panel language, and the threat actor’s Discord user’s activity, we believe the threat actor is Japanese.
Akamai MFA can mitigate the risk presented by SSH key harvesting.
In addition, configuring strong SSH passwords should stop the malware in its tracks since it uses a very basic list of default passwords to spread.
We have also published IOCs, queries, signatures, and scripts that can be used to test for infection.