­Security researchers discovered that several new malware strains are targeting known Cloudera Hadoop vulnerabilities.

The malware variants, including XBash and DemonBot, target Hadoop clusters that are connected to the internet and do not use Kerberos authentication, according to Cloudera. This can lead to certain exploits such as bitcoin mining and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which can create significant negative performance impacts within client environments.

These vulnerability attacks can occur when your Cloudera Hadoop system is not properly configured and secured. For example, when Kerberos is not enabled clusterwide, your Hadoop clusters become yet another possible attack vector.

The good news is that the attack techniques in question are not sophisticated and utilize known exploits, meaning organizations can protect themselves by taking the right precautions.

Protect Yourself With Strong Kerberos Authentication

Countering such attacks requires the use of strong Kerberos authentication to identify the right access for privileged users. Without proper Kerberos authentication, any user can connect to Hadoop clusters, access the system and make bad choices.

To follow best practices, implement additional authentication steps to secure your Cloudera Hadoop clusters, including the following:

• Secure default accounts and passwords.
• Utilize Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication for Cloudera Manager.
• Enable Sentry service using Kerberos.
• Use a secure protocol such as Transport Layer Security (TLS).
• Secure default ports.

How do you know whether or not your environment is at risk to begin with? That’s where vulnerability scans come into play.

How to Identify if Your Cloudera Hadoop Clusters Are Affected

Vulnerability assessment solutions for Cloudera Hadoop can provide critical insight into your environment to help mitigate potential attacks. Advanced tools offer security checks and hardening rules to help customers secure their Hadoop clusters, provide rules to help identify Hadoop-specific vulnerabilities, and list detailed recommendations to fix and resolve the vulnerabilities.

To use vulnerability assessment tests to check whether a Cloudera authentication parameter is appropriately set to Kerberos — which is strongly recommended by Cloudera — an organization should take the following steps:

1. Leverage a vulnerability assessment solution to run the following test: “Authentication method set to Kerberos.”
2. If a cluster is properly configured, it will pass the test. Multiple systems can be connected to check for this test and get visibility into configuration statuses in minutes.
3. After running the tests, organizations should attend to the clusters that did not pass. Note that such vulnerabilities can only be addressed with proper configuration, not by simply applying the latest security patches.
4. Once the configurations have been updated and all nodes authenticate using Kerberos, the problem will be resolved.

As these recent attacks illustrate, vulnerability assessment is a critical piece of any comprehensive data protection program. Last year alone, more than 2 billion records were exposed due to misconfigurations — a number that could have been drastically reduced if teams had been leveraging vulnerability scanning tools.

Source: Cloudera