Powerful Malware Disguised as Crypto Miner Infects 1M+ Windows, Linux PCs

Salamendacious@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 272 points – Powerful Malware Disguised as Crypto Miner Infects 1M+ Windows, Linux PCs
pcmag.com

Antivirus provider Kaspersky uncovers a sophisticated piece of 'StripedFly' malware camouflaged as a cryptocurrency miner that's been targeting PCs for more than five years.

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this makes use of an old windows specific vulnerability. Linux is only mentioned on the title, not again in the whole article. clickbait.

edit: downvote me if you want, but the original article didn't say a thing about Linux.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/stripedfly-malware-framework-infects-1-million-windows-linux-hosts/

On Linux, the malware assumes the name 'sd-pam'. It achieves persistence using systemd services, an autostarting .desktop file, or by modifying various profile and startup files, such as /etc/rc*, profile, bashrc, or inittab files.

That's from a completely different article.

And it doesn't say how this is achieved without already having root privilegies. I'm not sure I believe this can in fact infect a Linux system, except if it's already heavily compromised, for instance by a user logging in as root as default.

.bashrc and .profile can be modified without root, as can autostarting .desktop files. I think systemd and anything in /etc require root though.
Also a lot of users set sudo to not require a password (I am guilty of this) which makes privilege escalation easy.

It is a different article, but both articles are simply reporting research by Kaspersky, and Kaspersky goes into quite a bit of depth covering the Linux side of the threat, which is very real. PCMag focuses mostly on the windows side, because it's a windows focused site.

This isn't a single exploit, this is a "framework" that can take advantage of multiple exploits and will use which ever one it can find. You don't need to be "heavily compromised" you just need to be vulnerable to one of the compromises. And you definitely don't need root either.

Maybe if root is shared via SMB1 and is rw

Not possible AFAIK, I don't use anything Microsoft, but AFAIK SMB1 shares on Linux are through Samba, and you can't just enable write permissions without root. So as I stated before, the Linux system needs to be already compromised.

Users can configure the system however they want.

I'm not a Linux user (except for Chromebook and Android) so honestly the Linux section wasn't personally important to me. Another commentor wanted more information on the Linux side so I looked briefly if I could find an article that might be helpful. Linux terminology is all Greek to me so I honestly wouldn't know. I thought the article was interesting and I thought other people might find it interesting. The Linux part didn't even enter into my mind.

It does include this:

quietly spread across a victim’s network, including to Linux machines.

But that's a completely ridiculous lack of detail of any actual vulnerability. Smells like bullshit.
The quote from OP is from a different article.

I wasn't intentionally trying to imply that it came from the article. That's why I posted the naked link. I wasn't really thinking about the Linux component when I posted the article.

That’s why I posted the naked link.

Which is perfectly fine and dandy. I think some people just had a knee jerk reaction, based on a misunderstanding of context.

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It does though: "On Linux, the malware assumes the name 'sd-pam'. It achieves persistence using systemd services, an autostarting .desktop file, or by modifying various profile and startup files, such as  /etc/rc*, profile, bashrc, or inittab files."

So technically useless . it can't do shit.

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