Description

SentinelLabs analyzed a new modular 'AlienFox' toolkit, allowing threat actors to scan for misconfigured servers to steal authentication secrets and credentials for cloud-based email services including Google Workspace, AWS, Twilio, Nexmo, Office365, Zimbra, and Zoho. The AlienFox toolkit is sold to cybercriminals via a private Telegram channel, which usually targets common misconfigurations in popular services like online hosting frameworks, such as Laravel, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Opencart, Prestashop, and WordPress. As per the researchers' report, the attackers employ AlienFox to collect lists of cloud endpoints that are poorly configured using security scanning tools like LeakIX and SecurityTrails. Afterward, AlienFox searches the misconfigured servers with data-extraction scripts for sensitive configuration files that are frequently used to store secrets, including API keys, account credentials, and authentication tokens. Also, other scripts are included in the AlienFox toolkit to create persistence and increase privileges on vulnerable systems. AlienFox is a modular toolkit made up of modified open-source utilities and various custom tools, with three different versions. The first version, AlienFox v2, focuses on extracting credentials from web server configuration or environment files by analyzing the files for credentials and testing them on the targeted server, attempting to SSH using the Paramiko Python library. In addition, AlienFox v2 includes the awses.py script, which automates message sending and receiving on Amazon SES (Simple Email Services) and applies elevated privilege persistence to the threat actor's AWS account. Furthermore, the second version, AlienFox v3, includes an exploit for CVE-2022-31279, a deserialization flaw in the Laravel PHP Framework, and has added automatic key and secret extraction from Laravel environments, while the stolen data now had tags identifying the harvesting technique used. The third version, AlienFox v4, has better performance using initialization variables, Python classes with modular functions, and process threading. Also, it has better script and code organization, expanded targeting scope by adding WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Prestashop, Magento, Opencart, and even includes an account checker for Amazon retail site, and an automated cryptocurrency wallet seed cracker for Ethereum and Bitcoin.