Security News > 2021 > June > Kubeflow Deployments Targeted in New Crypto-mining Campaign
A newly observed malicious campaign is targeting Kubeflow workloads to deploy TensorFlow pods that are used to mine for crypto-currency, according to a warning from security researchers at Microsoft.
According to Microsoft, the recent campaign popped up on their radar at the end of May, when TensorFlow pods started being deployed at scale on multiple Kubernetes clusters.
"The burst of deployments on the various clusters was simultaneous. This indicates that the attackers scanned those clusters in advance and maintained a list of potential targets, which were later attacked at the same time," Microsoft explained in a blog post.
As part of the attacks, the adversary abused access to the Kubeflow centralized dashboard to create a new ML pipeline using the Kubeflow Pipelines platform.
TensorFlow images were deployed in the containers, to perform the crypto-currency mining.
The adversary deployed a reconnaissance container to gather information on the environment prior to launching the mining activity, Microsoft explains.