Rocke: The Champion of Monero Miners

This post was authored by David Liebenberg.

Summary

Cryptocurrency miners are becoming an increasingly significant part of the threat landscape. These malicious miners steal CPU cycles from compromised devices to mine cryptocurrencies and bring in income for the threat actor.

In this post, we look at the activity of one particular threat actor: Rocke. We will examine several of Rocke’s campaigns, malware, and infrastructure while uncovering more information about the actor. After months of research, we believe that Rocke is an actor that must be followed, as they continue to add new features to their malware and are actively exploring new attack vectors.

Introduction

Talos has written widely about the issue of cryptomining malware and how organizations should protect systems against this threat. We continue to actively research developments in this threat through research that includes monitoring criminal forums and deploying honeypot systems to attract these threats. It is through these intelligence sources that the Chinese-speaking actor which we refer to as “Rocke” came to our attention.

Rocke actively engages in distributing and executing cyrptomining malware using a varied toolkit that includes Git repositories, HttpFileServers (HFS), and a myriad of different payloads, including shell scripts, JavaScript backdoors, as well as ELF and PE miners.