GINC-APT-0542 · Hacktivist

IronErn440

Category
Hacktivist · Political or nationalist, often disruption and leaks.
Origin
Unknown
Sources
4 sources carry it
Identifier
GINC-APT-0542 · ironern440

What it is

IronErn440 is a threat actor tracked by Oligo Security for orchestrating the ShadowRay 2.0 campaign, an evolution of attacks since September 2023 exploiting CVE-2023-48022, a missing authentication flaw in the Ray AI framework's Job Submission API. The actor submits malicious jobs to exposed Ray clusters (port 8265), deploying multi-stage Bash/Python payloads via GitHub/GitLab repositories like "ironern440-group" and "thisisforwork440-ops" to propagate worm-like, hijack NVIDIA GPUs for XMRig cryptomining, pivot laterally, create reverse shells, kill competing miners, limit CPU to 60%, and persist via cron jobs pulling updates every 15 minutes. Additional capabilities include DDoS via sockstress on port 3333 (targeting mining pools), region-specific malware (e.g., China checks), LLM-generated payloads, and use of tools like interact.sh for scanning over 230,500 public Ray servers; mitigations involve firewalling, authorization, and Anyscale's port checker.

Tools

The tools and malware families the sources tie to it.

  • China Chopper
  • Miner-C
  • Xploit

Sources

  • Malpedia malpedia.caad.fkie.fraunhofer.de