IronErn440
- First seen
- 2023-09-01 00:00:00
- Primary motivation
- financial-gain
- Sophistication
- advanced
- Resource level
- organization
- Actor type
- criminal
- Profile updated
- 2026-07-07 12:24:56
Targeted industries: technology-and-telecommunications financial-services
Targeted regions: country_code:cn
Context
IronErn440 is a threat actor tracked by Oligo Security for orchestrating the ShadowRay 2.0 campaign, an evolution of attacks since September 2023 exploiting CVE-2023-48022, a missing authentication flaw in the Ray AI framework's Job Submission API. The actor submits malicious jobs to exposed Ray clusters (port 8265), deploying multi-stage Bash/Python payloads via GitHub/GitLab repositories like "ironern440-group" and "thisisforwork440-ops" to propagate worm-like, hijack NVIDIA GPUs for XMRig cryptomining, pivot laterally, create reverse shells, kill competing miners, limit CPU to 60%, and persist via cron jobs pulling updates every 15 minutes. Additional capabilities include DDoS via sockstress on port 3333 (targeting mining pools), region-specific malware (e.g., China checks), LLM-generated payloads, and use of tools like interact.sh for scanning over 230,500 public Ray servers; mitigations involve firewalling, authorization, and Anyscale's port checker.
Exploited vulnerabilities
- CVE-2023-48022 (vulnerability)
Reports & references
- oligo.security — Shadowray 2 0 Attackers Turn Ai Against Itself In Global Campaign That Hijacks Ai Into Self Propagating Botnet (report)