Hackers Found Crypto Mining in Tesla AWS Servers

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New research from the RedLock CSI team revealed that the latest victim of cryptojacking is Tesla. Hackers were able to find  Kubernetes administration consoles accessible over the internet without any password protection. 

Within these consoles, access credentials to these organizations’ Amazon Web Services (AWS)  Security firm Redlock investigation, team determined that hackers had secretly infiltrated  public cloud environments and were using the compute instances to mine cryptocurrencies

Within one Kubernetes pod, access credentials were exposed to Tesla’s AWS environment which contained an Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) bucket that had sensitive data such as telemetry.

In addition to the data exposure, hackers were performing crypto mining from within one of Tesla’s Kubernetes pods. The team noted some sophisticated evasion measures that were employed in this attack.

  • Unlike other crypto mining incidents, the hackers did not use a well known public “mining pool” in this attack. Instead, they installed mining pool software and configured the malicious script to connect to an “unlisted” or semi-public endpoint. This makes it difficult for standard IP/domain based threat intelligence feeds to detect the malicious activity.
  • The hackers also hid the true IP address of the mining pool server behind CloudFlare, a free content delivery network (CDN) service. The hackers can use a new IP address on-demand by registering for free CDN services. This makes IP address based detection of crypto mining activity even more challenging.
  • Moreover, the mining software was configured to listen on a non-standard port which makes it hard to detect the malicious activity based on port traffic.
  • Lastly, the team also observed on Tesla’s Kubernetes dashboard that CPU usage was not very high. The hackers had most likely configured the mining software to keep the usage low to evade detection.

The RedLock CSI team immediately reported the incident to Tesla and the issue was quickly rectified. RedLock reprotedly received a $3,000 bounty.