this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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180
Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021 (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Can't be infected if I keep wiping my partition for a new shiny distro

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Your install USB is infected by a rookit and reinstalls itself on connect.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Jokes on you, the rootkit is likely my own and I just forgot about it.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 weeks ago

It's tough being an ADHD Hacker

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

This was my first thought. I haven’t had the same os installed for a few months max, nevermind 3 years

[–] [email protected] 77 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Crowd strike looking for a new market?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago

Unfortunately they are already in the market and making a mess: https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_restoration_tools/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

ssh with an easy to guess root password?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Wouldn't that simply be a user mistake?
It's kind of like saying if you remove the password completely, it's vulnerable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

what does FUD stand for?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Fear, uncertainty and doubt

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

No mention of transmission methods as far as I understand the article

[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

maybe the number of files it scans looking for misconfigurations

So how did it get into the system to be able to scan configuration files?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Separate remote code execution vulnerability in unupdated versions of RocketMQ, a Chinese-developed messaging/streaming server, in the case of the infection described in the article. It's possible that there are a few other RCE vulns it can make use of, but 20000 of them seems unlikely.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've been using Linux since 2005, and I've heard all sorts of stories about Linux having "security problems", and almost every time it turns out to be a problem that can't be exploited on it's own. but requires the use of other vulnerabilities.
The only exception I can recall is the zx util compression tool, which was detected before it was rolled out.

Zero day vulnerabilities have been non existent for 20 years to my knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I’ve been using Linux since 2005

Okay, so as a n00b you can be somewhat forgiven. As someone who started with Slack in 1997 I don't have that excuse.

...and almost every time it turns out to be a problem that can’t be exploited on it’s own. but requires the use of other vulnerabilities.

Since when did chaining vulnerabilities make something not a problem? Are you claiming that the CUPS vulnerability announced in late September isn't an issue simply because it takes multiple steps?

The only exception I can recall is the zx util compression tool...

I don't mean to be an ass but were you asleep December 2021 through January 2022? Log4Shell was a 10 of 10 critical vulnerability!

What about CVE-2022-47939 from December 2022?

I can keep going if needed but I think my point is made. The vulnerabilities, even true kernel level stuff, are out there.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

They have an "attack flow" diagram that seems to indicate a hacker installing it directly through a known vulnerability.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Seeing the diagram, it only attacks servers with misconfigured rocketMQ or CVE-2023-33426, which is already patched. Am I understanding this correctly?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

It probably has a large database of exploits it can use. The article claims 20k, but this seems to high for me.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago

Thousands!? Shit. That's like all of them!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Sounds like it should at least be noticeable if you monitor resource usage?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's how some people found it, but it would disappear when someone would login to investigate.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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 ;)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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.....

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago

Millions of systems shut down by dumb microsoft os.