Bitcoin mining 64 bit

My Kippo farm has been largely retired as most of the captured sessions where becoming stale and ‘samey’. Thankfully however, I’ve still been getting daily reports thanks to this script (now available in BitBucket repo) and this morning something new caught my attention – a ‘guest’ attempted to turn the compromised machine into a BitCoin miner.

For anyone living under a rock for the last few months, Bitcoin is the first of a new breed of ‘crypto-currency’; essentially a decentralised monetary format with no geographical (or regulatory) boundaries. If you need a refresher, a good basic guide is here if you want to get up to speed.

Our guest connected from an IP address that hasn’t appeared in the honeypot logs previously; whilst the password on the root account is (intentionally) weak, I still find it unlikely that our guest got lucky on the very first attempt. Suspicions at this point are that either the compromised machine was identified as part of a previous compromise; anyone that has run a SSH honeypot for any length of time will be aware that attackers frequently attempt to use compromised machines to scan for other vulnerable victims and that successful rogue log-ins also often disconnect immediately – my assumption has always been that this is nothing more than automated scanners identifying and confirming valid credentials before reporting the system details back to their master for manual follow-up. It is also possible that this particular guest acquired a list of pre-identified vulnerable systems as a foundation for future activities.