Huntress researchers discovered an advanced intrusion of chained log poisoning, lightweight China Chopper/AntSword web shell, and the open-source Nezha RMM to install Ghost RAT on over 100 machines. The first foothold was from an unauthenticated phpMyAdmin instance left exposed after a DNS update; the attacker misused MariaDB's general log to write a PHP backdoor into a web-accessible log file and followed that up with using that one-line web shell for remote command execution. Once it had web access, the actor kicked out a Nezha agent and config and uncovered a dashboard (port 80) that rendered real?time data and an infected host map. Nezha was not only utilized for monitoring but to execute a Ghost RAT executable (x.exe) that shut down Defender, established persistence through a fictitious "SQLlite" service, and staged a three?stage payload that could perform remote commands, DLL loading, and screen capture. The operator operated in interfaces of Simplified Chinese and Russian, probably to obfuscate attribution. Victims were concentrated in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, with isolated infections in Europe, Brazil and Africa. Huntress tied infrastructure to domains/IPs and a registrant pattern indicative of China?nexus behavior, observing overlap with other RAT families and DGA?style domain rotations. The post points out how legacy misconfigurations, innovative log injection, and legitimate management tools can be aggregated into a powerful, multi?stage compromise.
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