Web Hacking Service ‘Araneida’ Tied to Turkish IT Firm
upstart writes:
Web Hacking Service 'Araneida' Tied to Turkish IT Firm:
Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix, a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services, one of which KrebsOnSecurity traced to an information technology firm based in Turkey.
Cyber threat analysts at Silent Push said they recently received reports from a partner organization that identified an aggressive scanning effort against their website using an Internet address previously associated with a campaign by FIN7, a notorious Russia-based hacking group.
But on closer inspection they discovered the address contained an HTML title of "Araneida Customer Panel," and found they could search on that text string to find dozens of unique addresses hosting the same service.
It soon became apparent that Araneida was being resold as a cloud-based service using a cracked version of Acunetix, allowing paying customers to conduct offensive reconnaissance on potential target websites, scrape user data, and find vulnerabilities for exploitation.
Silent Push also learned Araneida bundles its service with a robust proxy offering, so that customer scans appear to come from Internet addresses that are randomly selected from a large pool of available traffic relays.
The makers of Acunetix, Texas-based application security vendor Invicti Security, confirmed Silent Push's findings, saying someone had figured out how to crack the free trial version of the software so that it runs without a valid license key.
"We have been playing cat and mouse for a while with these guys," said Matt Sciberras, chief information security officer at Invicti.
[...] Silent Push notes that the website where Araneida is being sold - araneida[.]co - first came online in February 2023. But a review of this Araneida nickname on the cybercrime forums shows they have been active in the criminal hacking scene since at least 2018.
[...] Researchers at Silent Push say despite Araneida using a seemingly endless supply of proxies to mask the true location of its users, it is a fairly "noisy" scanner that will kick off a large volume of requests to various API endpoints, and make requests to random URLs associated with different content management systems.
What's more, the cracked version of Acunetix being resold to cybercriminals invokes legacy Acunetix SSL certificates on active control panels, which Silent Push says provides a solid pivot for finding some of this infrastructure, particularly from the Chinese threat actors.
Further reading: Silent Push's research on Araneida Scanner.
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