Subissues
| Summary | Description |
|---|---|
| SMS Pumping | Adversaries may leverage messaging services for SMS pumping, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability.(Citation: Twilio SMS Pumping) SMS pumping is a type of telecommunications fraud whereby a threat actor first obtains a set of phone numbers from a telecommunications provider, then leverages a victim’s messaging infrastructure to send large amounts of SMS messages to numbers in that set. By generating SMS traffic to their phone number set, a threat actor may earn payments from the telecommunications provider.(Citation: Twilio SMS Pumping Fraud) Threat actors often use publicly available web forms, such as one-time password (OTP) or account verification fields, in order to generate SMS traffic. These fields may leverage services such as Twilio, AWS SNS, and Amazon Cognito in the background.(Citation: Twilio SMS Pumping)(Citation: AWS RE:Inforce Threat Detection 2024) In response to the large quantity of requests, SMS costs may increase and communication channels may become overwhelmed.(Citation: Twilio SMS Pumping) |
| Bandwidth Hijacking | Adversaries may leverage the network bandwidth resources of co-opted systems to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability. Adversaries may also use malware that leverages a system's network bandwidth as part of a botnet in order to facilitate [Network Denial of Service](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1498) campaigns and/or to seed malicious torrents.(Citation: GoBotKR) Alternatively, they may engage in proxyjacking by selling use of the victims' network bandwidth and IP address to proxyware services.(Citation: Sysdig Proxyjacking) Finally, they may engage in internet-wide scanning in order to identify additional targets for compromise.(Citation: Unit 42 Leaked Environment Variables 2024) In addition to incurring potential financial costs or availability disruptions, this technique may cause reputational damage if a victim’s bandwidth is used for illegal activities.(Citation: Sysdig Proxyjacking) |
| Cloud Service Hijacking | Adversaries may leverage compromised software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact hosted service availability. For example, adversaries may leverage email and messaging services, such as AWS Simple Email Service (SES), AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS), SendGrid, and Twilio, in order to send large quantities of spam / [Phishing](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1566) emails and SMS messages.(Citation: Invictus IR DangerDev 2024)(Citation: Permiso SES Abuse 2023)(Citation: SentinelLabs SNS Sender 2024) Alternatively, they may engage in LLMJacking by leveraging reverse proxies to hijack the power of cloud-hosted AI models.(Citation: Sysdig LLMJacking 2024)(Citation: Lacework LLMJacking 2024) In some cases, adversaries may leverage services that the victim is already using. In others, particularly when the service is part of a larger cloud platform, they may first enable the service.(Citation: Sysdig LLMJacking 2024) Leveraging SaaS applications may cause the victim to incur significant financial costs, use up service quotas, and otherwise impact availability. |
| Compute Hijacking | Adversaries may leverage the compute resources of co-opted systems to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability. One common purpose for [Compute Hijacking](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1496/001) is to validate transactions of cryptocurrency networks and earn virtual currency. Adversaries may consume enough system resources to negatively impact and/or cause affected machines to become unresponsive.(Citation: Kaspersky Lazarus Under The Hood Blog 2017) Servers and cloud-based systems are common targets because of the high potential for available resources, but user endpoint systems may also be compromised and used for [Compute Hijacking](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1496/001) and cryptocurrency mining.(Citation: CloudSploit - Unused AWS Regions) Containerized environments may also be targeted due to the ease of deployment via exposed APIs and the potential for scaling mining activities by deploying or compromising multiple containers within an environment or cluster.(Citation: Unit 42 Hildegard Malware)(Citation: Trend Micro Exposed Docker APIs) Additionally, some cryptocurrency mining malware identify then kill off processes for competing malware to ensure it’s not competing for resources.(Citation: Trend Micro War of Crypto Miners) |
Linked Issues
| Linktype | Issue |
|---|---|
| is related to | Techniques |
| is blocked by | Resource Hijacking Detection Strategy |
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