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New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#12
LD_PRELOAD and hooking the libc syscall wrappers doesn't seem very reliable.

It won't work on static binaries, it depends on the user not clearing the environment and there are also many programs that use the syscall directly, bypassing the hooks. From playing with file system hooks I remember programs written in Go and sqlite used to do this.

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#13
post #8

LD_PRELOAD isn't a particularly new attack vector... and it is limited to the permissions of the user it is being run as. So it still needs an unpatched privilege excalation to do any real harm

> So it still needs an unpatched privilege excalation to do any real harm https://xkcd.com/1200 All the important stuff you’d need to ruin someone’s life only needs their user account anyway, why is it such a relief if someone doesn’t get root access?

Yes, but somehow it affects all processes and installs a rootkit. That's going to need more than an unprivileged user account's access to the system. It's not clear from the article how that access is gained.

> Instead of being a standalone executable file that is run to infect a machine, it is a shared object (SO) library that is loaded into all running processes using LD_PRELOAD (T1574.006), and parasitically infects the machine. Once it has infected all the running processes, it provides the threat actor with rootkit functionality, the ability to harvest credentials, and remote access capability.

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#15
LD_PRELOAD rootkits are by definition not "ultra-stealthy".

Nothing here looks special, there are a plenty of these:

https://github.com/chokepoint/Jynx2

https://github.com/chokepoint/jynxkit

https://github.com/NexusBots/Umbreon-Rootkit

https://github.com/chokepoint/azazel

https://github.com/unix-thrust/beurk

https://github.com/mempodippy/vlany

https://github.com/nopn0p/rkorova

And presumably tens more I've forgotten about. Highschoolers write stuff like this.

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#16
post #10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbiote Deep-Dive: Analysis of a New, Nearly-Impossible-to-Detect Linux Threat And disclosed in a blog post, with Nearly-Impossible-to-Read text.

Do you mean text font/colour or the content itself?

Not sure about GP, but the Font / Color combo is darn near impossible for me to read.

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#17

Very clever hiding techniques. Makes me wonder which state level actor(s) are behind this one?

These are not very clever hiding techniques, for the most part these are the most basic techniques known to every 15 year old malware dev reading decades old literature.

Ars fell for marketing speech from an AV company that has every reason to hype their discovery.

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#19
post #14
post #3

This looks exactly like what one of my friends in college wrote.

Curious why this gets downvoted. Despite all the marketing talk parroted by Ars, this looks like a bog standard LD_preload rootkit.

I was thinking the same thing as GP. This particular article reads like a creepypasta, which makes me think there's nothing really to see here.

Re: New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery

#20
post #2

Direct link to the blog post with all details https://www.intezer.com/blog/research/new-linux-threat-symbi...

>Analysis of a New, Nearly-Impossible-to-Detect Linux Threat

Yeah, that's a straight up lie. LD_PRELOAD kits are by definition very easy to detect.

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