IronErn440

Also known as: IronErn440

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.

Introduction

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.

Activities and Tactics

Information pending cataloguing.

Notable Campaigns

Information pending cataloguing.

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)

Information pending cataloguing.

Notable Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)

No curated IOCs are currently published for this actor. This section will be updated when stable, attributable indicators are available.

Malware and Tools

  • China Chopper
  • Miner-C
  • Xploit

Attribution and Evidence

Information pending cataloguing.

References

References pending cataloguing.