Microsoft has released a new report highlighting a new series of attacks targeting a toolbox called Kubeflow that is used to perform machine learning operations on Kubernetes clusters. The attacks began in April of this year and continued with the goal of installing a cryptocurrency miner on Kubernetes pools that are exposed to the Internet and run Kubeflow. In a blog post, Yossi Weizman, Security Research Software Engineer at Azure Security Center, provided more details about Kubeflow and why nodes used for machine learning tasks are such an attractive target for cybercriminals, saying: “Kubeflow is an open source project, which started as a project to run the TensorFlow job on Kubernetes. Kubeflow has grown to become a popular framework for performing machine learning tasks on Kubernetes. The nodes used for ML tasks are often relatively powerful, and in some cases include GPUs. This fact makes Kubernetes pools used for ML tasks a perfect target for encryption campaigns, which was the target of this attack. "
Microsoft has tracked these attacks since they first appeared online in April. However, after the first wave of attack, the cryptomining syndicate behind them shifted from targeting general-purpose Kubernetes pools to specifically targeting those using Kubeflow to run machine learning operations. Based on the results of its initial investigation, the software giant now believes that misconfigured Kubeflow instances are the most likely entry point for attackers. This is likely the result of Kubeflow administrators changing the default settings of the toolbox, which exposed their admin panel online. By default, the Kubeflow admin panel is only accessible from inside the Kubernetes cluster and not over the Internet. According to Weizman, a cryptomining syndicate is actively investigating these online panels. Once found, the group deploys a new server image to the Kubeflow clusters running a Monero cryptocurrency mining application called XMRig. Server administrators can check if their Kubeflow instances have been hacked by entering this command: kubectl get pods –all-namespaces -o jsonpath = ”{. ArticlesContainers .spec..image} "| grep -i ddsfdfsaadfs. To avoid falling victim to these attacks, server administrators should ensure that the Kubeflow control panel is not exposed to the Internet. Via ZDNet