Corona Mirai botnet spreads via AVTECH CCTV zero-day 

An instance of the Corona Mirai botnet spreads via AVTECH CCTV zero-day and multiple previously known vulnerabilities.

Akamai’s Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) has detected a botnet campaign exploiting multiple previously known vulnerabilities and a newly discovered zero-day, tracked as CVE-2024-7029 (CVSS score: 8.7), in AVTECH CCTV cameras. The flaw is a command injection issue in the brightness function of AVTECH CCTV cameras, which can be exploited for remote code execution (RCE).

“This RCE zero-day vulnerability was discovered in the brightness function of AVTECH IP camera devices and allows for a command injection to spread a Mirai variant on a target system. This can be executed remotely with elevated privileges (running process owner.)” reads the analysis published by Akamai.

In August 2024, US CISA issued an industrial control system (ICS) advisory to warn of this vulnerability. “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow an attacker to inject and execute commands as the owner of the running process.” reads the advisory published by CISA. “Commands can be injected over the network and executed without authentication.”

The vulnerability impacts Avtech AVM1203 IP cameras running firmware versions FullImg-1023-1007-1011-1009 and prior.

The US agency states that it is suspected that prior versions of other IP cameras and NVR (network video recorder) products are also affected.

The cyber security expert Larry Cashdollar of Akamai Technologies reported the vulnerability to CISA.

“Similar to many other botnets, this one is also spreading a variant of Mirai malware to its targets.” continues the report.

“In this instance, the botnet is likely using the Corona Mirai variant, which has been referenced by other vendors as early as 2020 in relation to the COVID-19 virus.” 

Upon execution, the bot connects to various hosts via Telnet on specific ports and displays the string “Corona” on infected systems. The malware exploits several vulnerabilities, including CVE-2017-17215 in Huawei devices, using hard-coded command and control IPs. The bot also targets AVTECH issues, a Hadoop YARN RCE, and CVE-2014-8361.

At the time of this writing, the vulnerability is still unpatched.

“A vulnerability without a formal CVE assignment may still pose a threat to your organization — in fact, it could be a significant threat. Malicious actors who operate these botnets have been using new or under-the-radar vulnerabilities to proliferate malware. CVE-2024-7029 is another example of using the latter, which is becoming an increasingly popular attack trend observed by the SIRT.” concludes the report that includes Indicators of Compromise (IoCs). “There are many vulnerabilities with public exploits or available PoCs that lack formal CVE assignment, and, in some cases, the devices remain unpatched.”

Pierluigi Paganini

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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Mirai Botnet)