Can’t be infected if I keep wiping my partition for a new shiny distro
Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021
Submitted 1 month ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
sirico@feddit.uk 1 month ago
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Your install USB is infected by a rookit and reinstalls itself on connect.
NiHaDuncan@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Jokes on you, the rootkit is likely my own and I just forgot about it.
saddlebag@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This was my first thought. I haven’t had the same os installed for a few months max, nevermind 3 years
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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 to get attention maybe to make you think you need additional security software.
whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Crowd strike looking for a new market?
ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Unfortunately they are already in the market and making a mess: theregister.com/…/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_resto…
cron@feddit.org 1 month ago
ssh with an easy to guess root password?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Wouldn’t that simply be a user mistake?
blibla@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
what does FUD stand for?
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Fear, uncertainty and doubt
zante@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
No mention of transmission methods as far as I understand the article
Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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?
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 1 month ago
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.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 month ago
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.
JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
They have an “attack flow” diagram that seems to indicate a hacker installing it directly through a known vulnerability.
luciddaemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Seeing the diagram, it only attacks servers with misconfigured rocketMQ or CVE-2023-33426, which is already patched. Am I understanding this correctly?
cron@feddit.org 1 month ago
It probably has a large database of exploits it can use. The article claims 20k, but this seems to high for me.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Thousands!? Shit. That’s like all of them!
li10@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Sounds like it should at least be noticeable if you monitor resource usage?
Pantsofmagic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s how some people found it, but it would disappear when someone would login to investigate.
li10@feddit.uk 1 month 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.
cron@feddit.org 1 month ago
Yes, but they replace common tools like top or lsof with manipulated versions. This might at least trick less experienced sysadmins.
li10@feddit.uk 1 month 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).
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Vulnerable to 20,000 misconfigurations, But squirted 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…
sunbeam60@lemmy.one 1 month ago
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 thus problem :)
misk@sopuli.xyz 1 month 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).
JoShmoe@ani.social 1 month ago
Millions of systems shut down by dumb microsoft os.
CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Shouldn’t be this hard to find out the attack vector.
Buried deep, deep in their writeup:
RocketMQ servers
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.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 month 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.