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Malware Infects 70% of Seagate Central NAS Drives, Earns $86,400 (softpedia.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: A new malware family has infected over 70% of all Seagate Central NAS devices connected to the Internet. The malware, named Miner-C or PhotoMiner, uses these hard-drives as an intermediary point to infect connected PCs and install software that mines for the Monero cryptocurrency... The crooks made over $86,000 from Monero mining so far.
The hard drives are easy to infect because Seagate does not allow users to delete or deactivate a certain "shared" folder when the device is exposed to the Internet. Over 5,000 Seagate Central NAS devices are currently infected.
Researchers estimates the malware is now responsible for 2.5% of all mining activity for the Monero cryptocurrency, according to the article. "The quandary is that Seagate Central owners have no way to protect their device. Turning off the remote access NAS feature can prevent the infection, but also means they lose the ability to access the device from a remote location, one of the reasons they purchased the hard drive in the first place."
The hard drives are easy to infect because Seagate does not allow users to delete or deactivate a certain "shared" folder when the device is exposed to the Internet. Over 5,000 Seagate Central NAS devices are currently infected.
Researchers estimates the malware is now responsible for 2.5% of all mining activity for the Monero cryptocurrency, according to the article. "The quandary is that Seagate Central owners have no way to protect their device. Turning off the remote access NAS feature can prevent the infection, but also means they lose the ability to access the device from a remote location, one of the reasons they purchased the hard drive in the first place."
The worst part of the story is that the HDD is made by Seagate and won't last more than 13 months regardless. The users think they bought a good network drive, until they go to retrieve their files and discover the drive has already bought the farm.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It is not difficult to setup http://www.freenas.org/ on a small server machine, and benefit from FreeBSD security with no (known) backdoor accounts. If you're really serious get a proper NAS motherboard with ECC RAM (if you're not using ECC RAM, then it means you're not very serious with your data anyways), which won't cost you more than $500 with the case and the PSU.
Of course if you're unable or unwilling to secure your box, accept that anything on the Internet is wide open, and buy (rent) online storage from Amazon, Box, or somewhere similar. Amazon gives free unlimited backup account with prime (which is around $99)
Once again, exposing various things directly to the Internet is a Bad Thing.
Indeed it is, but it likely isn't really exposed "directly to the Internet". More likely it runs some service through a Seagate server that makes it available (likely by default, no less). After all, this is designed for home users and how many home users even would know how to modify their router's default rules to expose a specific port on a specific system to the internet?
claiming device owners "have no way to protect their device" is bullshit.
Well, if the first thing it does out of the box is call home to Seagate to give owners remote access to their files through the magical Seagate cloud, then the statement might be pretty darned accurate. These drives most likely default to getting addresses by DHCP on the user's network, and the user most likely gets their outside address by DHCP from their ISP. These hackers likely aren't finding these drives to be exposed directly, but rather to be exposed via Seagate. And considering the (lack of) quality that is Seagate these days, the drives probably have some terrible default password as well that makes it trivially easy for a hacker to get in.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The criminals are in shady and desperate corners of the world and it's unlikely we can do much about them. Control what you can control; though, and don't do known risky things.
Table-ized A.I.
This.
I have one of these devices. The first thing that must be done is to create an account on thw Seagate server. All account creation and password changes go through their server.
The devicw itself is utter crap. Linux OS with an NTFS formatted. The transfer speed using ethernet is comparable to dialup.
Stay away from anything Seagate / NAS. Waste of money.
sed s/"IoT//g
Any device, be it IoT, a client, server, network device, or anything has this problem. In my experience, security is perceived to have no ROI, so at best it gets lip service, at worse, it is obviously ignored. I have seen "encryption" where all zeroes were used as AES keys for all operations, 4096 bit keys that were really sixty-four, 64-bit RSA keys (really giving 70 bits of security), tons of added stuff, no OS firewalling, disinterest in any updates, locking down firmware where no updates can be performed (this is extremely routine, because it adds planned obsolesce, and companies have zero responsibility to provide them, even if there is a major, show-stopper bug.)
The best device on the Internet is no device. Next to that, it is having devices placed between hardened firewalls, only communicating to a few machines, real secure mechanisms for updates [1], and so on. Ideally devices should communicate to a hardened hub, and the hub handles everything else.
[1]: Back in the 1990s, RSA was not prevelant, so motherboard makers actually had to use real security. No motherboard flashing could be done until a physical switch was flipped. This may not be possible for all devices, but it should be considered part of the flashing process, to stop rogue firmware "upgrades."
The criminals are virtually untouchable:
1: They are likely in countries of the world that have zero interest in turning them over for justice. In fact, they may be regarded as folk heroes or equivalents of Robin Hood, taking money from corporations or countries and bringing it to the region.
2: They are likely using employees to do the dirty work, with plenty of anonymity between them and the higher ups.
3: Malware can be traced, and a lot of people suggest origin, but code can be edited and spread anywhere in the world, so code that originally came from Latveria can be used and abused by people from Lower Elbonia, and if distribution is done, the whitehats may never know the real origin.
4: Compromising an endpoint isn't too difficult these days. If someone hacks a wi-fi router and compromises a home computer, all it takes is deleting the offending stuff securely, and that becomes a dead end.
5: For every one criminal, there are others behind them.
6: LEOs have many cases on their hands. It might be doubtful they may have the resources to handle anything but the big names, so chasing after every bad guy would be about as fruitful as chasing every pot smoker in the US.
Going after criminals is nice, but that is a game of whack-a-mole. Unfortunately, computer security is a defensive war, but there are useful tools on the whitehat end which can help mitigate attacks.
Long term, it may not be something is wanted in any shape or form, but I think what may end up happening is that countries themselves will demand control of the routers that go from one nation to another and enforce rules there. China has that, Iran is building it, and other countries are looking into blocking at their virtual borders, just like physical borders. It might be a token thing now, but as time goes on and money is put into it, it may become something all countries have in place, just so another country that has IP ranges that are hotspots for attack are blocked there, so every single Internet entity in the nation wouldn't have to deal with them.
There's a culture of insecurity at Seagate's NAS unit.
Some years ago, we (not a security or IT firm) reported some issues with their web interface. Basically there was a public (no authentication needed) PHP script in the directory used to serve the web admin interface which ran arbitrary commands from the URI as wheel. That could be used to reset the admin password, load and run arbitrary code, load an entire hostile OS for the NAS, etc.
Support didn't understand the issue, and security ignored it as being too difficult to exploit in practice. We soon pointed out to Seagate and some friendly media that there were hundreds of these exploitable Seagate NAS boxes indexed on Google, including Organizations working in charitable and vulnerable sectors, and that we would be contacting Seagate's customers about the issue.
They still didn't admit that there was an issue, but their next 'firmware' update addresses the issue by requiring a password to run arbitraty commands from the URI. The passwors was the same for all devices and was stored in a plaintext file in the same publicly accessible directory.
We stopped using Seagate products altogether after that experience.