The XWiki CVE-2025-24893 exploitation campaign demonstrates a rapidly evolving multi-faceted attack landscape where threat actors leverage unauthenticated remote code execution through Groovy code injection in the SolrSearch macro. Attackers employ a diverse toolkit ranging from automated botnet operations (RondoDox) to sophisticated two-stage payload delivery mechanisms that stage downloaders in the /tmp/ directory before executing cryptocurrency miners 20+ minutes later. The attack chains include reverse shell establishment using BusyBox netcat and bash TCP redirections to attacker-controlled infrastructure, with some operations originating from compromised QNAP devices and legitimate AWS IP addresses. Reconnaissance efforts span from Nuclei-based scanning executing cat /etc/passwd for validation to custom OAST callback mechanisms, while payload delivery leverages standard Linux utilities (wget, curl) to retrieve obfuscated base64-encoded scripts from DynamicDNS domains and hardcoded IP addresses. The campaigns ultimately deploy XMRig cryptocurrency miners for resource hijacking, though the reverse shell capabilities indicate potential for more damaging follow-on activities including data exfiltration and lateral movement.
My favorite technique for avoiding scenarios like the XWiki exploitation is Sysmon For Linux - AND it's FREE!!! Sysmon For Linux integrated with SIEM technology represents one of the most effective defensive strategies for detecting these attack patterns, yet Linux system monitoring remains critically underutilized in many enterprise environments despite the abundance of clear indicators present in these campaigns. Sysmon for Linux provides granular telemetry on process creation events that would immediately flag suspicious Java-spawned bash processes executing commands like bash -i >& /dev/tcp/[IP]/[port], file creation events in /tmp/ directories with .sh extensions from web server processes, and network connection events to non-standard ports from Apache or Tomcat parent processes. When this telemetry is centralized in a SIEM platform, correlation rules can easily identify the two-stage attack pattern—first detecting the wget/curl download, then correlating the subsequent execution of the staged script—while baseline analytics can flag rare process relationships like web servers spawning netcat or establishing direct TCP connections. The oversight in Linux monitoring is a critical miss given that these indicators are remarkably unsubtle: base64-encoded payloads in web logs, shell scripts downloaded from external IPs, cryptominer processes consuming CPU resources, and reverse shells with obvious >& redirection syntax. Organizations that implement comprehensive Linux endpoint visibility through Sysmon For Linux (https://github.com/bobby-tablez/FT-Linux-Sysmon-Config) and route these events to their SIEM would detect these attacks within minutes rather than discovering them weeks later through performance issues or security audits, yet many security teams continue to focus exclusively on Windows endpoints while leaving their internet-facing Linux web servers functionally blind to post-exploitation activity.