Quote:A recently observed variant of the Muhstik botnet is exploiting a recently disclosed Oracle WebLogic server vulnerability for cryptomining and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
 
Tracked as CVE-2019-2725 and patched last week, the critical vulnerability is a deserialization issue that allows unauthenticated remote command execution, and has been exploited in attacks before a patch was released. 
 
Soon after the vulnerability became public knowledge and proof-of-concept code was made public, security organizations started to observe new attacks targeting it, including the new Sodinokibi ransomware. 
 
According to Palo Alto Networks, a new variant of the Muhstik Linux botnet emerged over the weekend, which attempts to leverage the very same WebLogic flaw to infect systems. 

Alive since March 2018 and packing wormlike self-propagating capabilities, Muhstik is known to target Linux servers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to abuse them for cryptocurrency mining or for DDoS attacks. 
 
The botnet has been observed leveraging multiple exploits for infection purposes, including some targeting WordPress and Drupal vulnerabilities. It even attempted to exploit a previous WebLogic flaw, CVE-2017-10271.