ShadowRay

Campaign overview

MITRE ATT&CK historical record. Dates reflect source observations. Current activity and target-region classification are not asserted; Global denotes unclassified catalogue coverage. 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.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

This is a historical record and does not establish current campaign activity.

Threat actor

Not established

Attribution confidence

Not established

First documented activity

2023-09-01

End date

Not established

Estimated victims

Not established

Reported impact

Not established

Unknown attribution, confidence and impact remain unspecified. Regional labels can include unspecified targets; assess the source evidence before acting.

Documented timeline

1. 2023-09-01

   Source-reported first observation; not a claim of current activity or confirmed campaign start/end.

   Source: MITRE ATT&CK

2. 2024-03-01

   Source-reported last observation; not a claim of current activity or confirmed campaign start/end.

   Source: MITRE ATT&CK

MITRE ATT&CK techniques

• T1190 · Exploit Public-Facing Application

  Initial Access — During ShadowRay, threat actors exploited CVE-2023-48022 on publicly exposed Ray servers to steal computing power and to expose sensitive data.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1027.013 · Encrypted/Encoded File

  Stealth — During ShadowRay, threat actors used Base64-encrypted Python code to evade detection.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1003.008 · /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow

  Credential Access — During ShadowRay, threat actors used `cat /etc/shadow` to steal password hashes.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1546.004 · Unix Shell Configuration Modification

  Privilege Escalation, Persistence — During ShadowRay, threat actors executed commands on interactive and reverse shells.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1588.002 · Tool

  Resource Development — During ShadowRay, threat actors used tools including the XMRig miner and Interactsh.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1105 · Ingress Tool Transfer

  Command And Control — During ShadowRay, threat actors downloaded and executed the XMRig miner on targeted hosts.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1059.006 · Python

  Execution — During ShadowRay, threat actors used the Python `pty` module to open reverse shells.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1016 · System Network Configuration Discovery

  Discovery — During ShadowRay, threat actors invoked DNS queries from targeted machines to identify their IP addresses.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1068 · Exploitation for Privilege Escalation

  Privilege Escalation — During ShadowRay, threat actors downloaded a privilege escalation payload to gain root access.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

• T1496.001 · Compute Hijacking

  Impact — During ShadowRay, threat actors leveraged graphics processing units (GPU) on compromised nodes for cryptocurrency mining.(Citation: Oligo ShadowRay Campaign MAR 2024)

Linked indicators

0 reviewed indicators. An indicator’s presence does not establish that every resource on shared infrastructure is malicious.

No reviewed indicators are supplied. None are inferred from the campaign description.

Documented infrastructure

No reviewed infrastructure is supplied.

Sources and evidence

• MITRE ATT&CK C0045

  Official MITRE ATT&CK campaign record C0045. Derived from mitre/cti commit 50be388e93819a5d20e71cbaaeccfda157abc846. Actor links and technique mappings are attributed to this source; confidence, victims, monetary impact and infrastructure are not inferred.

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