Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021
Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021
The ability to remain installed and undetected makes Perfctl hard to fight.
Shouldn’t be this hard to find out the attack vector.
Buried deep, deep in their writeup:
RocketMQ servers
- CVE-2021-4043 (Polkit)
- CVE-2023-33246
I’m sure if you’re running other insecure, public facing web servers with bad configs, the actor could exploit that too, but they didn’t provide any evidence of this happening in the wild (no threat group TTPs for initial access), so pure FUD to try to sell their security product.
Unfortunately, Ars mostly just restated verbatim what was provided by the security vendor Aqua Nautilus.
There's also a buried reference to using a several-years-patched gpac bug to gain root access before this thing can do most of its stealth stuff.
Basically, it needs your system to already have a known, unpatched RCE bug before it can get a foothold, and if you've got one of those you have problems that go way beyond stealth crypto miners stealing electricity.
Can't be infected if I keep wiping my partition for a new shiny distro
This story reeks of FUD.
exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets,
Because a "common misconfiguration" will absolutely make your system vulnerable!?!
OK show just ONE!This is FUD to either prevent people from using Linux, or simply a hoax to get attention, or maybe to make you think you need additional security software.
Crowd strike looking for a new market?
Unfortunately they are already in the market and making a mess: https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_restoration_tools/
ssh with an easy to guess root password?
Wouldn't that simply be a user mistake?
It's kind of like saying if you remove the password completely, it's vulnerable.
what does FUD stand for?
Fear, uncertainty and doubt
No mention of transmission methods as far as I understand the article
The whole thing sounds fishy. Like it's trying to convince people Linux is inherently vulnerable.
exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations
Like WTF?
It's kind of an iffy assertion. That's maybe the number of files it scans looking for misconfigurations it can exploit, but I'd bet there's a lot of overlap in the potential contents of those files (either because of cascading configurations, or because they're looking for the same file in slightly different places to mitigate distro differences). So the number of possible exploits is likely far fewer.
Like it’s trying to convince people Linux is inherently vulnerable.
I'm typing this reply from a machine running KDE Plasma on top of Linux Mint 22.
I'm not sure what precisely what you mean by "inherently" but I'd like to point that "Linux" has security problems all over the place; the kernel has issues, the DEs have issues, the applications have issues. It's more secure than Windows but that's not a very high bar.
They have an "attack flow" diagram that seems to indicate a hacker installing it directly through a known vulnerability.
Seeing the diagram, it only attacks servers with misconfigured rocketMQ or CVE-2023-33426, which is already patched. Am I understanding this correctly?
It probably has a large database of exploits it can use. The article claims 20k, but this seems to high for me.
Thousands!? Shit. That's like all of them!
Sounds like it should at least be noticeable if you monitor resource usage?
That's how some people found it, but it would disappear when someone would login to investigate.
Sure, but it’s still fairly detectable when it’s on a server at least, as long as you have monitoring. Just a bitch to pinpoint and fix.
Yes, but they replace common tools like top or lsof with manipulated versions. This might at least trick less experienced sysadmins.
Edit: Some found out about the vulnerability by ressource alerts. Probably very easy in a virtualized environment. The malware can't fool the hypervisor ;)
Not quite the monitoring I’m talking about though.
Basically, it seems like this would be a nightmare for a home user to detect, but a company is probably gonna pick up on this quite quickly with snmp monitoring (unless it somehow does something to that).
Vulnerable to 20,000 misconfigurations, But thearted by 42 billion different simple checks that we all do anyway.
5 minute load greater than 80% of the number of cores? That's an alarm.....
Luckily I sit right next to my home server and can hear when the fans kick in under load. The absence of noise tells me I don’t have this problem :)
Mine is ultra low voltage and I barely maintain it so this article gave me a bit of a scare. I’ll probably wipe it by the next reinstall anyway since it’s been nearly 10 years of Ubuntu LTS upgrades and it’s a mess (both what I’ve done to it and what Ubuntu has done to itself).
Millions of systems shut down by dumb microsoft os.