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ICANN got hacked by crypto bots

Kevin Murphy, April 16, 2019, 12:43:10 (UTC), Domain Tech

ICANN had to take down its community wiki for several hours last week after it got hacked by crypto-currency miners.
The bad guys got in via one of two “critical” vulnerabilities in Confluence, the wiki software that ICANN licences from Atlassian Systems, which ICANN had not yet patched.
ICANN’s techies noticed the wiki, which is used by many of its policy-making bodies to coordinate their work, was running slowly April 11.
They quickly discovered that Atlassian had issued a vulnerability warning on March 20, but ICANN was not on its mailing list (doh!) so hadn’t been directly notified.
They also determined that a malicious “Crypto-Miner” — software that uses spare CPU cycles to attempt to create new cryptocurrency coins — had been installed and was responsible for the poor performance.
ICANN said it took the wiki down, restored it to a recent backup, patched Confluence, and brought the system back online. It seems to have taken a matter of hours from discovery to resolution.
The organization said it has now subscribed to Atlassian’s mailing list, so it will be notified of future vulnerabilities directly.


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