Cybercriminals have leveraged browser-based WebAssembly to compromise up to 207 websites with malicious code for cryptocurrency miner deployment, The Hacker News reports.
Sucuri researchers discovered that impacted websites had a theme file compromised to facilitate the injection of the malicious JavaScript code named 'hxxps://wm.bmwebm[.]org/auto.js' that would then load upon accessing the webpage.
"Once decoded, the contents of auto.js immediately reveal the functionality of a cryptominer which starts mining when a visitor lands on the compromised site," said Sucuri researcher Cesar Anjos.
WebAssembly is then leveraged by the deobfuscated auto.js code to allow low-level binary code execution on the browser. The report also showed that the actor-controlled domain 'wm.bmwebm[.]org', which has been undetected for more than a year and a half, could enable automated generation of JavaScript files impersonating Google Ads and other legitimate services.
"This functionality also makes it possible for the bad actor to inject the scripts in multiple locations on the compromised website and still maintain the appearance that injections 'belong' within the environment," added Anjos.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.