The Australian Cyber Security Centre said a group of "state actors" hacked Australian networks on June 19 and one of the vulnerabilities they exploited is related to cryptojacking malware attacks.

Co-ordinate to the 48-page report released on June 24, the threat actors exploited four critical vulnerabilities in Telerik UI, including CVE-2019-18935, which was recently leveraged by the Blue Mockingbird malware gang to infect thousands of systems with XMRRig, a Monero (XMR) mining software.

Vulnerability generally used for cryptojacking purposes

Although the informational didn't say if hackers could have installed cryptojacking malware during the contempo massive cyberattack, such vulnerability is the preferred one for the cybercriminals for installing crypto-mining applications within corporate networks.

The report elaborates on the CVE-2019-18935 vulnerability, which besides has similarities with the ones that Cointelegraph reported on the Blueish Mockingbird'due south attack, although it doesn't imply that such gang participated in the cyberattack against Australia:

"Other exploit payloads were identified by the ACSC most commonly when the actor's attempt at a reverse beat out was unsuccessful. These included: a payload that attempted to execute a PowerShell reverse beat; a payload that attempted to execute certutil.exe to download another payload; a payload that executed binary malware (identified in this advisory as HTTPCore) previously uploaded by the actor but which had no persistence mechanism; a payload that enumerated the absolute path of the web root and wrote that path to a file inside the spider web root."

Were land-backed Chinese hacker groups behind the set on?

Almost ten Chinese hacker groups - engaged with espionage activities and allegedly accept connections with China'due south government - take the PlugX malware amid their weapons, which was 1 of the malware identified in the Australian authorities's study.

Some Australian officials accept suggested that China could be behind the massive cyberattack, equally the diplomatic problems have been on the rise between the two countries. It was said the attack could have come later Australia sought for an investigation on the origin of the COVID-19 virus, something that was not well-received the dragon nation officials, as they considered information technology a "discriminatory" allegation and responded with merchandise retaliation confronting the Oceanic country.

The Chinese regime has denied the claims.