CrowdStrike Warns of Phishing Scam Targeting Job Seekers with XMRig Cryptominer

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is alerting of a phishing campaign that exploits its own branding to distribute a cryptocurrency miner that’s disguised as an employee CRM application as part of a supposed recruitment process.

“The attack begins with a phishing email impersonating CrowdStrike recruitment, directing recipients to a malicious website,” the company said. “Victims are prompted to download and run a fake application, which serves as a downloader for the cryptominer XMRig.”

The Texas-based company said it discovered the malicious campaign on January 7, 2025, and that it’s “aware of scams involving false offers of employment with CrowdStrike.”

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The phishing email lures recipients by claiming that they have been shortlisted for the next stage of the hiring process for a junior developer role, and that they need to join a call with the recruitment team by downloading a customer relationship management (CRM) tool provided in the embedded link.

The downloaded binary, once launched, performs a series of checks to evade detection and analysis prior to fetching the next-stage payloads.

These checks include detecting the presence of a debugger and scanning the list of running processes for malware analysis or virtualization software tools. They also ensure that the system has a certain number of active processes and the CPU has at least two cores.

Should the host satisfy all the criteria, an error message about a failed installation is displayed to the user, while covertly downloading the XMRig miner from GitHub and its corresponding configuration from another server (“93.115.172[.]41”) in the background.

“The malware then runs the XMRig miner, using the command-line arguments inside the downloaded configuration text file,” CrowdStrike said, adding the executable establishes persistence on the machine by adding a Windows batch script to the Start Menu Startup folder, which is responsible for launching the miner.

Fake LDAPNightmare PoC Targets Security Researchers

The development comes as Trend Micro revealed that a fake proof-of-concept (PoC) for a recently disclosed security flaw in Microsoft’s Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) – CVE-2024-49113 (aka LDAPNightmare) – is being used to lure security researchers into downloading an information stealer.”

The malicious GitHub repository in question – github[.]com/YoonJae-rep/CVE-2024-49113 (now taken down) – is said to be a fork of the original repository from SafeBreach Labs hosting the legitimate PoC.

The counterfeit repository, however, replaces the exploit-related files with a binary named “poc.exe” that, when run, drops a PowerShell script to create a scheduled task to execute a Base64-encoded script. The decoded script is then used to download another script from Pastebin.

The final-stage malware is a stealer that collects the machine’s public IP address, system metadata, process list, directory lists, network IP addresses, network adapters, and installed updates.

“Although the tactic of using PoC lures as a vehicle for malware delivery is not new, this attack still poses significant concerns, especially since it capitalizes on a trending issue that could potentially affect a larger number of victims,” security researcher Sarah Pearl Camiling said.

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