Coverity Scan Hacked, Abused for Cryptocurrency Mining
21.3.2018 securityweek Cryptocurrency

Coverity Scan, a free service used by tens of thousands of developers to find and fix bugs in their open source projects, was suspended in February after hackers breached some of its servers and abused them for cryptocurrency mining.

Synopsys, which acquired Coverity in 2014, started notifying Coverity Scan users about the breach on Friday. The company said malicious actors gained access to Coverity Scan systems sometime in February.

“We suspect that the access was to utilize our computing power for cryptocurrency mining,” Synopsys told users. “We have not found evidence that database files or artifacts uploaded by the open source community users of the Coverity Scan service were accessed. We retained a well-known computer forensics company to assist us in our investigation.”

Synopsys says the service is now back online and it believes the point of access leveraged by the attackers has been closed. In order to regain access to Coverity Scan, users will need to reset their passwords.

“Please note that the servers in question were not connected to any other Synopsys computer networks. This should have no impact on customers of our commercial products, and this event did not put any Synopsys corporate data or intellectual property at risk,” users were told.

Cybercriminals have become increasingly interested in making a profit by hacking PCs and servers and abusing them to mine cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency mining malware can target a wide range of devices, including industrial systems.

One recent high-profile victim was the carmaker Tesla, whose Kubernetes pods were compromised and used for cryptocurrency mining. According to RedLock, which discovered the breach, hackers gained access to Tesla’s Kubernetes console due to the lack of password protection.