WARPscan: Cloudflare WARP Abused to Hijack Cloud Services
Cado Security (now a part of Darktrace) found attackers are abusing Cloudflare's WARP service, a free VPN, to launch attacks. WARP traffic often bypasses firewalls due to Cloudflare's trusted status, making it harder to detect. Campaigns like "SSWW" cryptojacking and SSH brute-forcing exploit this trust, highlighting a significant security risk for organizations.
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
Written by
Nate Bill
Threat Researcher
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17
Jul 2024
Introduction: WARPscan
Researchers from Cado Security Labs (now part of Darktrace) have observed several recent campaigns making use of Cloudflare’s WARP[1] service in order to attack vulnerable internet-facing services. In this blog we will explain what Cloudflare WARP is, the implications for its use in opportunistic attacks, and provide a few case studies on real-world attacks taking advantage of WARP.
What is Cloudflare WARP?
Cloudflare WARP is effectively a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that uses Cloudflare’s international backbone to “optimize” user’s traffic. This is a free service, meaning anyone can download and use it for their own purposes. In practice, WARP just tunnels traffic to the nearest Cloudflare data center over a custom implementation of WireGuard, which they claim will speed up your connection.
Cloudflare WARP is designed to present the IP of the end user to Cloudflare CDN customers. However, attacks observed by Cado researchers exclusively connect directly to IP addresses rather than Cloudflare’s CDN, with the attacker in control of the transport and application layers. As such, it is not possible to determine the IP of the attackers.
Implications of attacks originating from WARP
Network administrators are far more likely to inherently trust or overlook traffic originating from Cloudflare’s ASN as it is not a common attack origin, and is often used in many organizations as a part of regular business operations. As a result of this, the IP ranges used by WARP may even be allowed in firewalls, and might be missed during triage of alerts by Security Operations Center (SOC) teams.
Cado Security has observed several threads on sysadmin forums, where network operators are advised to “allowlist” all of Cloudflare’s IP ranges instead of just those specific to a given service, which is a serious security risk that makes their infrastructure directly vulnerable to attackers using WARP to launch their attacks.
These factors make attacks using WARP potentially more dangerous unless an organization takes preventive action, such as educating security teams and ensuring WARP IP ranges are not included in Cloudflare related firewall rules.
Case study - SSWW mining campaign
The SSWW campaign is a novel cryptojacking campaign targeting exposed Docker which utilizes Cloudflare WARP for initial access. Based on the TLS certificate used by the C2 server, it would appear that the C2 was created on September 5, 2023. However, the first attack detected against Cado’s honeypot infrastructure was on February 21, 2024, which lines up with the dropped payload’s Last-Modified header of February 20, the day before. This is likely when the current campaign began.
The attack began with a container being created with elevated permissions, and access to the host. The image used is simply selected from images that are already available on the host, so the attacker does not have to download any new images.
The attacker then creates a Docker VND stream in order to run commands within the created container:
This downloads the main SSWW script from the attacker’s command and control (C2) infrastructure and sets it running. The SSWW script is fairly straightforward and does the following set up tasks:
Attempts to stop “systemd” services that belong to competing miners.
Exits if the system is already infected by the SSWW campaign.
Disables “SELinux”.
Sets up huge pages and enables drop_caches, common XMRig optimizations
Downloads https://94[.]131.107.38:58282/sst, an XMRig miner with embedded config, and saves it as /var/spool/.system
Attempts to download and compile https://94[.]131.107.38:58282/phsd2.c, which is a simple off-the-shelf process hider designed to hide the .system process. If this fails, it will download https://94[.]131.107.38:58282/li instead. The resultant binary of either of these processes is saved to /usr/lib/libsystemd-shared-165.so
Adds the above to /etc/ld.so.preload such that it acts as a usermode rootkit.
Saves https://94[.]131.107.38:58282/aa82822, a SystemD unit file for running /var/spool/.system, to /lib/systemd/system/cdngdn.service, and then enables it.
The configuration file can be extracted out of the miner, and observe that it is using the wallet address: 44EP4MrMADSYSxmN7r2EERgqYBeB5EuJ3FBEzBrczBRZZFZ7cKotTR5airkvCm2uJ82nZHu8U3YXbDXnBviLj3er7XDnMhP on the monero ocean gulf mining pool. We can then use the mining pool’s wallet lookup feature to determine the attacker has made a total of 9.57 XMR (~£1269 at time of writing).
While using Cloudflare WARP affords the attacker a layer of anonymity, we can see the IPs the attacks originate from are consistently deriving from the Cloudflare data center in Zagreb, Croatia. As Cloudflare WARP will use the nearest data center, this suggests that the attacker’s scan server is located in Croatia. The C2 IPs on the other hand are hosted using a Netherlands-based VPS provider.
The main benefit to the attacker of using Cloudflare WARP is likely the relative anonymity afforded by WARP, as well as the reduced suspicion around traffic related to Cloudflare. It is possible that some improperly configured systems that allow all Cloudflare traffic have been compromised as a result of this, however, it is not possible to say with certainty without having access to all compromised hosts infected by the malware.
Case study - opportunistic SSH attacks
Since 2022, Cado Security has been tracking SSH attacks originating from WARP addresses. Initially these were fairly limited, however around the end of 2023 they surged to a few thousand per month. These frequently rise and fall with quite a high velocity, suggesting that the surges are the result of individual campaigns rather than a more general trend.
Figure 1: SSH attacks originating from WARP addresses since the end of 2023
Interestingly, a number of SSH campaigns we have seen previously originating from commonly abused VPS providers now appear to have migrated to using Cloudflare WARP. As these VPS providers are soft on abuse, it is unlikely that the purpose of this was for anonymity. Instead, the attackers are likely trying to take advantage of Cloudflare’s “clean” IP ranges (many “dirty” ranges belonging to bulletproof hosting are blocklisted, e.g. by spamhaus [2]), as well as the higher likelihood of the Cloudflare ranges being overlooked or blindly allowed in the victim’s firewall.
All of the attacks seen so far from Cloudflare WARP appear to be simple SSH brute forcing attacks, however it is alleged that the recent CVE-2024-6387 is now being exploited in the wild [3]. An attacker could perform this exploit via Cloudflare WARP in order to take advantage of overly trusting firewalls to attack organizations that may not otherwise have the vulnerable SSH server exposed.
Conclusion
The main threat posed by attackers using Cloudflare’s WARP service is the inherent trust administrators may have in traffic originating from Cloudflare, and the dangerous advice to “allow all Cloudflare IPs” being circulated online. Ensure your organization has not granted permission for 104[.]28.0.0/16 in your firewall. Follow a defense in-depth approach and additionally ensure services such as SSH have strong authentication (via SSH keys instead of passwords) and are up-to-date. Do not expose Docker to the internet, even if it is behind a firewall.
Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.
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React2Shell Reflections: Cloud Insights, Finance Sector Impacts, and How Threat Actors Moved So Quickly
This blog breaks down how attackers rapidly weaponized the React2Shell vulnerability, with a particular focus on cloud‑native financial environments. Drawing on Darktrace’s honeypot research, it explores emerging threat actor tooling, exploitation timelines, and why behavioral‑anomaly‑led security is critical in today’s cloud landscape.
Hola VPN Abuse: From Proxy Traffic to Malware and Cryptomining
Introduction
In enterprise environments, non-compliant software traffic can introduce unexpected exposure by creating unmanaged paths for outbound connectivity. Hola VPN is a notable example because of its peer-to-peer design, which can effectively turn user devices into routing or exit nodes for other parties’ traffic, shifting the risk profile from that of a traditional virtual private network (VPN) to something closer to a distributed proxy.
As a result, the appearance of Hola-related activity, whether from prior installation or unintended background connections, should be treated with caution. Such activity may provide a foothold for malicious behavior, including lateral movement or command-and-control communication.
This blog explores how Hola-associated activity appeared as part of broader patterns of suspicious behavior observed across the Darktrace customer base.
The campaign
In February and March 2026, Darktrace observed similar anomalous activity across multiple customer environments, with affected devices showing consistent behavioral patterns. These included connections to multiple *.hola[.]org endpoints using Hola-related user agents, suggesting interaction with Hola infrastructure rather than isolated or incidental traffic.
Following these connections, affected customer environments showed downloads of suspicious executable files from rare external endpoints 188.241.219[.]55 and 184.241.218[.]111. Both endpoints have been flagged as potentially malicious by open-source intelligence (OSINT) [1][2].
These downloads were conducted using consistent user agents across impacted customers, specifically ‘Hola svc_js_win32/1.249.408’ and ‘Hola svc_js_win32/1.251.389’, suggesting a possible association with Hola-related activity.
Notably, this pattern aligns with recent reporting that, in some cases, Hola distributed an undeclared executable component, me[.]exe, which was later assessed to be a likely Monero-mining binary introduced via a compromised delivery pipeline [3].
Case Study 1
Darktrace first observed a new device on January 19, 2026, within a customer environment based in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. On the same day it appeared on the network, the device communicated with multiple pieces of Hola VPN-linked infrastructure before downloading a binary from a hola[.]org subdomain.
Figure 1: Cyber AI Analyst investigation highlighting Hola VPN service activity potentially associated with subsequent HTTP command-and-control (C2) connections.
Subsequent Darktrace telemetry revealed a recurring pattern of activity from the day the device was first observed through to March 4, 2026. During this period, the device repeatedly issued HTTP GET requests to the URI /bwfile?size=1048576, each returning a 200 OK response, indicating successful file retrieval.
This behavior was accompanied by a POST request to /bwfile, followed by an additional GET request for a significantly larger file at /bwfile?size=26214400, suggesting a deliberate and structured file transfer pattern.
Notably, the binary download activity was not tied to a single static host. Instead, it was observed across multiple URLs that changed over time while remaining within the same hola[.]org domain. This pattern suggests the use of rotating or distributed delivery infrastructure rather than a fixed endpoint.
Figure 2: Variation in URLs over time within the same hola[.]org domain, indicating the use of dynamically changing endpoints.
Across these events, the activity was consistently associated with the user agent Hola svc_js_win32/1.249.408, further linking the traffic to Hola-related service components. Amid these persistent and unusual connections, on February 22, Darktrace observed the device connecting to 188.241.219[.]55/proxy-peer-windows-amd64[.]exe, resulting in the download of an executable file.
Figure 3: File transfer event showing the download of an executable from the rare external endpoint 188.241.219[.]55.
Based on its file hash, the downloaded file was assessed as a likely Trojan downloader [4], with import hash (imphash) values showing similarities to samples linked to Vidar, Rhadamanthys, and Stealc according to OSINT [5]. Overall, this sequence of activity suggests that Hola-related connectivity may have been leveraged as part of a broader malware delivery chain.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response
Due to the highly unusual activity observed, Darktrace Autonomous Response was triggered by the device’s behavior. However, as the customer deployment was configured in “Human Confirmation” mode, manual approval was required before any action could be taken.
Had the deployment been set to “Fully Autonomous” mode, Darktrace would have automatically:
Blocked connections to the associated ports and external endpoints
Prevented all outgoing network connections from the device
Enforced the device’s established ‘pattern of life’, allowing normal activity to continue while restricting any anomalous behavior
Figure 4: Example of a Darktrace Autonomous Response model highlighting the action that would have been taken, demonstrating how the system identifies anomalous behavior and applies targeted containment measures to restrict suspicious network activity.
Case Study 2
While the first case focused on anomalous activity from a newly observed device, Darktrace also identified cases in which devices had already been communicating with Hola-related endpoints prior to the suspected campaign. This may suggest pre-existing Hola usage within the environment, potentially increasing exposure and creating an avenue for subsequent suspicious activity.
One case involved three devices within a customer network based in the Americas (AMS). In this instance, a different payload was identified: me[.]exe, a potentially malicious cryptocurrency miner also referred to as HolaMonitorService[.]exe [6][7]. The downloads were observed from infrastructure similar to that seen in Case 1, including an IP address within the same 188.241.0.0/16 subnet.
Connections to *.hola[.]org, alongside the use of potential Hola-related user agents consistent with those in Case 1, were also identified, further suggesting a link between the observed activity and Hola-associated infrastructure.
Darktrace observed activity indicative of unusual VPN usage on the first affected device on February 2, followed by telemetry suggesting potential Tor usage. This was later followed by the download of me[.]exe on March 10 from 188.241.218[.]111. Notably, this device was the earliest among the three within the deployment to exhibit the presence of the suspicious executable.
Figure 5: Cyber AI Analyst detection highlighting the download of a suspicious executable from a similar external endpoint in a separate deployment.
On March 5, 2026, the second affected device exhibited a slightly different progression, initiating connections to http-test1[.]hola[.]org using the user agent ‘hola_get’. This activity was followed by the download of me[.]exe from the same endpoint on March 13, consistent with the broader pattern of Hola-related downloads observed across the environment.
Figure 6: Example of Hola VPN-related connectivity observed on the network prior to the suspected campaign, indicating pre-existing usage that may have contributed to subsequent activity.
The final affected device within this customer’s network demonstrated a more limited but related pattern, also downloading me[.]exe on March 17 using the same ‘hola_get’ user agent.
While the earlier Hola VPN usage observed across the deployment may not have been directly related to the suspected malware campaign, it may nonetheless have contributed to reduced visibility. The presence of pre-existing Hola-related traffic could have obscured malicious activity, making it more difficult to distinguish legitimate usage from attacker-driven behavior and, in turn, hindering the timely identification of the emerging compromise.
Darktrace’s Autonomous Response
For this deployment, the customer had their Autonomous Response capability configured in “Fully Autonomous” mode, allowing Darktrace to take action without human intervention. As a result, the system was able to autonomously disrupt the activity as soon as relevant events were identified through model detections.
Figure 7: Darktrace Autonomous Response actions taken against suspicious activity linked to Hola VPN.
Suspected cryptomining activity
As previously noted, some of the observed executable payloads appear to be linked to cryptomining malware. Across a subset of affected customer environments, this assessment was further supported by subsequent device activity consistent with Monero mining. Affected devices established follow-on connections to multiple external endpoints aligned with known mining infrastructure, indicating post-download execution.
Considering the broader sequence of activity, this pattern may point to a wider form of abuse in which legitimate VPN-related traffic is used to mask or facilitate malicious behavior following compromise.
On several devices, the download of executable files, including a newly observed peer[.]exe, was followed by alerts indicative of cryptocurrency mining activity. Mining-related credentials such as ‘x’ were observed using the Minergate protocol to communicate with endpoints within the 89.125.255.0/24 subnet and 188.241.218[.]111, the same endpoint involved in earlier download activity. Additional credentials appeared to reflect device-specific CPU identifiers, for example ‘12th Gen Intel(R) Core (TM) i5-1235U’.
Observed mining methods included login, submit, and job, consistent with active participation in a pool-based mining workflow rather than passive or incidental contact. The login method indicates that the host authenticated to the mining service as a worker, job reflects the assignment of computational tasks, and submit shows completed work being returned to the pool [8]. This sequence suggests that affected devices were actively contributing processing resources as part of an unauthorized distributed mining operation.
The presence of unauthorized cryptominers can lead to degraded system performance and reduced device stability. Beyond the immediate resource impact, such activity often serves as an indicator of a broader compromise rather than an isolated issue. This may increase the risk of further malware deployment, persistence mechanisms, and lateral movement, particularly in environments where the initial intrusion has not been fully contained.
Conclusion
Across affected environments, detections such as unusual VPN usage, connections to Hola infrastructure, anomalous HTTP activity, suspicious file downloads, and subsequent cryptomining behavior were linked into a single, evolving incident narrative. This aggregation provided a clearer view of attack progression, enabling security teams to understand not just isolated alerts, but the full sequence of compromise from initial contact through to post-exploitation.
Ultimately, these activities show that the risk posed by non-compliant software such as Hola VPN can extend far beyond simple policy violations. What began as traffic to Hola-related infrastructure was, in multiple cases, followed by behavior suggesting deliberate misuse, including suspicious executable downloads using Hola-related user agents and, in some instances, evidence of active cryptomining. These were not isolated anomalies, but elements of a broader pattern in which seemingly benign proxy or VPN-related communications may have created a pathway for malicious delivery and unauthorized resource exploitation.
The significance of this activity lies not only in the downloads or mining, but in what it reveals about an attacker’s ability to blend malicious operations into traffic associated with software that may already have a foothold in the environment. When unapproved software operates within an enterprise, it can reduce visibility, blur the distinction between legitimate and malicious traffic, and create opportunities to extend compromise in ways that are persistent and difficult to detect. Darktrace’s anomaly-based approach enables these behavioral distinctions to be identified, regardless of whether the device is new or long established within the network.
Credit to Min Kim (Associate Principal Analyst), Priya Thapa (Senior Cyber Analyst) Edited by Ryan Traill (Content Manager)
Cybersecurity for the Sports Sector: The Threats Facing a Digitized Industry in 2026
Securing sporting events in 2026
When you walk into a stadium on game day, you are entering a small smart city. Ticketing, turnstiles, payments, public Wi-Fi for tens of thousands of fans, CCTV, lighting, even the HVAC all run on connected systems. The experience for fans has become unmatched, but that dependency has created a much larger attack surface than people may realize.
Our latest threat research backs that up. In the past year, a survey that Darktrace commissioned found that 84% of respondents from professional sports organizations had at least one cyber incident, and 57% were hit more than once. For a sector that relies on the impact of the live moment, those numbers translate directly into operational risk.
Why sports is a target for cyber attacks
Sport is a highly visible target with fixed timelines, so attackers know exactly when disruption will have the most impact. It also holds valuable data, athlete medical records, contracts, sponsorship deals, which carry financial, reputational, and regulatory risk if exposed. At the same time, delivery depends on a wide set of third parties: ticketing providers, broadcasters, cloud services, stadium technology. Any of those connections can become an entry point. Put visibility, timing, data, and dependency together, and you get an environment where even a small foothold can turn into a visible, time-critical incident.
How attackers target email and identity
Email and identity remain the front door. From October 2025 through March 2026, Darktrace / EMAIL™ detected more than 116,000 phishing emails aimed at sports organizations across our customer base, and our sports customers received 19% more phishing emails than organizations in other sectors. The numbers tell the story:
BY THE NUMBERS
21% of phishing emails were aimed at VIPs.
37% used novel social engineering.
84% of malicious emails passed DMARC authentication
A large proportion of these emails passed authentication checks, which means traditional security controls are no longer a reliable barrier. Attackers are not relying on spoofed domains – they're using legitimate infrastructure and trusted platforms. Behavior matters. Once an account is compromised, the behavior shifts quickly. Login patterns change, inbox rules are created to hide responses, and accounts start being used for internal discovery or further phishing. These aren’t high-noise events. They sit in normal workflows, which is why they’re often missed.
Ransomware tells a similar story. In one case inside a sports deployment, attackers had quietly been moving data to an outside server for a full two weeks before they triggered encryption. By the time the ransom note appeared, the outcome was already set. That sequence shows up consistently is access first, movement next, disruption last. If detection starts at encryption, it’s already too late.
Why AI is an emerging blind spot in sports
The increasing adoption of AI is expanding the potential attack surface. 72% of the security professionals we surveyed expect AI to increase their cyber risk over the next year, and yet 35% are already using or planning to use it in stadium operations, the most critical functions to protect. In addition to prompt injection and AI build risks, shadow AI is becoming a more immediate issue. Staff are already putting sensitive data—performance metrics, scouting reports, contracts, health data—into tools with little or no governance. The upside is clear, but so is the exposure—and it is happening before most organizations have any visibility or control. At the same time, attackers are using the same technology to scale phishing and social engineering. The net effect is simple: more exposure, at higher speed.
How can cybersecurity professionals prepare
Across high profile events, Darktrace’s experience shows that effective cyber defense includes preparation, real‑time visibility, and the ability to respond dynamically and decisively when timing, complexity, and public exposure converge.
There are a few strategic implications for cybersecurity teams:
Get behavioral visibility across IT and OT, not just corporate systems.
Treat identity as your control plane. Most attacks in this sector start with credentials, not malware. MFA with behavioral detection helps solve that challenge.
Control third party and AI access the same way you control your own environment.
Rehearse response for live conditions, where decisions happen in minutes. Detection and response need to account for non-ideal conditions when engineers are under pressure and time constrained. In sport, timing is what turns small issues into major incidents. The same activity that would be manageable midweek becomes critical during a live event.
Why 2026 raises the cybersecurity stakes for sports
With the 2026 World Cup about to stretch across three countries and dozens of host cities, the attack surface is wide and the schedule is unforgiving.
Geopolitical signaling is raising the threat profile further. Previous international sporting events have demonstrated that nation‑state actors use the cyber domain to signal intent, influence narratives, or retaliate symbolically. In the context of the 2026 World Cup, Russia’s continued exclusion from international sport, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, US defensive support to Ukraine, and Iran’s likely participation in the tournament introduce additional motivations for state‑aligned and non‑traditional affiliated actors to operate below the threshold of armed conflict. This doesn’t require new techniques—just the right timing and visibility.
In practice, this comes down to preparation: knowing what normal looks like across IT and OT, controlling third-party access, and spotting when behavior shifts.
In sport, disruption does not build slowly—it happens in real time and in public. By that point, the groundwork has already been set, long before the whistle goes.
About this research
Findings are based on Darktrace threat-research telemetry across sports-sector customer deployments (Q4 2025–Q1 2026) and a survey of 875 IT cybersecurity professionals in the US, UK, Australia, and Germany, fielded by Opinion Matters between May 28 and June 3, 2026. Read the full report for complete methodology, incident analysis, and strategic recommendations.
![Variation in URLs over time within the same hola[.]org domain, indicating the use of dynamically changing endpoints.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/6a304bdeff111215c0436931_Screenshot%202026-06-15%20at%2012.00.43%E2%80%AFPM.png)
![File transfer event showing the download of an executable from the rare external endpoint 188.241.219[.]55.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/626ff4d25aca2edf4325ff97/6a304c2468d20aeff16a2721_Screenshot%202026-06-15%20at%2012.01.53%E2%80%AFPM.png)
