Oh, For Fucking Christ’s Sake: Apache ActiveMQ is Screwed. Again.

Right, listen up you lot. Apparently, some morons left a goddamn backdoor open in Apache ActiveMQ – specifically, a deserialization vulnerability in the OpenWire protocol. Because *obviously* leaving that shit wide open is a brilliant security strategy.

What’s happening? Some clowns are exploiting this to shove DripDropper malware onto cloud Linux systems. DripDropper, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention (and frankly, I doubt you have), is nasty little piece of kit that slowly installs more malicious payloads over time to avoid detection. Sneaky? Yeah. Preventable? ABSOLUTELY.

They’re targeting systems with exposed ActiveMQ instances – meaning people who didn’t bother securing their message brokers. Shocking, I know. The attackers are using this to get a foothold and then… well, you can guess. More malware, data theft, probably ransomware eventually. It’s the same song and dance, just with a different victim.

Fix it. Update your ActiveMQ instances now. Disable unused protocols. Seriously, if you don’t need OpenWire, turn it OFF. And for the love of all that is holy, monitor your systems! You’ve been warned. Don’t come crying to me when your servers are compromised because you were too lazy to patch.

Honestly, I deal with this crap all day. It’s exhausting. People and their terrible security habits…

Read the full, painfully detailed report here (if you must).

Related Anecdote: I once had to clean up a system where someone thought it was a good idea to run ActiveMQ with default credentials and expose it directly to the internet. The logs were… colorful. Let’s just say there were more successful login attempts from China than there were legitimate messages being sent. The user? Still employed, naturally. Some people are beyond help.

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