Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has published a research on PurpleUrchin, a freejacking campaign that has primarily targeted cloud platforms offering limited-time trials of cloud resources to perform cryptomining operations.
Executive Summary
Unit 42 researchers perform a deep dive into Automated Libra, the cloud threat actor group behind the freejacking campaign PurpleUrchin. Automated Libra is a South African-based freejacking group that primarily targets cloud platforms offering limited-time trials of cloud resources in order to perform their cryptomining operations.
Freejacking is the process of using free (or limited-time) cloud resources to perform cryptomining operations.
Key Points:
- In order to take advantage of the limited resources offered by free trials, the actors heavily leveraged DevOps automation techniques such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). They accomplished this by containerizing user account creations on cloud platforms and through automating their cryptomining operations.
- We collected more than 250 GB of container data created for the PurpleUrchin operation and discovered that the threat actors behind this campaign were creating three to five GitHub accounts every minute during the peak of their operations in November 2022.
- We also found that some of the automated account creation cases bypassed CAPTCHA images using simple image analysis techniques. We also identified the creation of more than 130,000 user accounts created on various cloud platform services like Heroku, Togglebox and GitHub.
- We found evidence of unpaid balances on some of these cloud service platforms from several of the created accounts. This finding suggests that the actors created fake accounts with stolen or fake credit cards.
- With this finding, we assess that the actors behind PurpleUrchin operations stole cloud resources from several cloud service platforms through a tactic Unit 42 researchers call “Play and Run.” This tactic involves malicious actors using cloud resources and refusing to pay for those resources once the bill arrives.
Palo Alto Networks customers receive protection from the events listed within the blog through the Prisma Cloud container vulnerability scanning and runtime protection policies.
To access the full report, please visit here