Campaign, Sep 2023 to Mar 2024.View on attack.mitre.org
ShadowRay was a campaign that began in late 2023 targeting the education, cryptocurrency, biopharma, and other sectors through a vulnerability (CVE-2023-48022) in the Ray AI framework named ShadowRay. According to security researchers ShadowRay was the first known instance of AI workloads being activley exploited in the wild through vulnerabilities in AI infrastructure. CVE-2023-48022, which allows access to compute resources and sensitive data for exposed instances, remains unpatched and has been disputed by the vendor as they maintain that Ray is not intended for use outside of a strictly controlled network environment.
| Technique | Procedure example |
|---|---|
| T1003.008 /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow |
During ShadowRay, threat actors used `cat /etc/shadow` to steal password hashes. |
| T1016 System Network Configuration Discovery |
During ShadowRay, threat actors invoked DNS queries from targeted machines to identify their IP addresses. |
| T1027.013 Encrypted/Encoded File |
During ShadowRay, threat actors used Base64-encrypted Python code to evade detection. |
| T1059.006 Python |
During ShadowRay, threat actors used the Python `pty` module to open reverse shells. |
| T1068 Exploitation for Privilege Escalation |
During ShadowRay, threat actors downloaded a privilege escalation payload to gain root access. |
| T1105 Ingress Tool Transfer |
During ShadowRay, threat actors downloaded and executed the XMRig miner on targeted hosts. |
| T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application |
During ShadowRay, threat actors exploited CVE-2023-48022 on publicly exposed Ray servers to steal computing power and to expose sensitive data. |
| T1496.001 Compute Hijacking |
During ShadowRay, threat actors leveraged graphics processing units (GPU) on compromised nodes for cryptocurrency mining. |
| T1546.004 Unix Shell Configuration Modification |
During ShadowRay, threat actors executed commands on interactive and reverse shells. |
| T1588.002 Tool |
During ShadowRay, threat actors used tools including the XMRig miner and Interactsh. |
MITRE does not attribute this campaign to a group.
None recorded.
Data from MITRE ATT&CK® (Enterprise). ATT&CK® is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.
