Seems to only relate to RHEL 6, or derivatives of, such as CentOS 6. Yes: 6. Which is as EOL as enterprise software gets: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Life...
RHEL 6 is in Extended Lifecycle Support until June 2024 (that is: customers with suitable subscriptions still get critical patches). It’s a zombie, but it’s not quite dead yet. I’d bet that there are still enough (+) people out there running it. (+) or rather too many.
Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
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Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#12Seems to only relate to RHEL 6, or derivatives of, such as CentOS 6. Yes: 6. Which is as EOL as enterprise software gets: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Life...
Comparatively, RHEL 6 is still kind of fine, at least it is still officially supported as virtualized OS in oVirt... We run a lot of CentOS 5 virtual machines (and some physical ones! ; and some RHEL4! , and a few Fedora core 8 and 4 !!!), with no end in sight... :( It is a huge concern for the Infra team, a source of many headaches, and we need to go through oops to keep them running, but: - Clients don't want to mo…
Surely this wouldn't take more than 2 weeks: just figure out the install instructions for the old piece of software, rewrite them as a part of a Dockerfile (or similar set of instructions to build an OCI image, there are other options out there, too), setup some basic CI/CD which will execute Docker/Podman/... build command and update any relevant documentation.
I actually recently did that with some legacy software, apart from additional optimizations like clearing yum/dnf cache after installs, it was pretty quick and also easy to do! If you are also in a situation where you need to use EOL software, I don't think there are many other decent options out there, short of trying to reproduce the old runtime on a new OS (as others suggested).
Running the old EOL OS will simply leave you with more vulnerabilities with no fixes in the long term and is generally a really bad idea. How did your security team greenlight that idea? In some orgs out there the devs would be made to stop doing whatever they're doing (outside of critical prod fixes) and would be forced to migrate to something newer before proceeding.
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparatively, RHEL 6 is still kind of fine, at least it is still officially supported as virtualized OS in oVirt... We run a lot of CentOS 5 virtual machines (and some physical ones! ; and some RHEL4! , and a few Fedora core 8 and 4 !!!), with no end in sight... :( It is a huge concern for the Infra team, a source of many headaches, and we need to go through oops to keep them running, but: - Clients don't want to mo…
Are you sure you want to disclose your employer's security risks and tech debts on a public forum?
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparatively, RHEL 6 is still kind of fine, at least it is still officially supported as virtualized OS in oVirt... We run a lot of CentOS 5 virtual machines (and some physical ones! ; and some RHEL4! , and a few Fedora core 8 and 4 !!!), with no end in sight... :( It is a huge concern for the Infra team, a source of many headaches, and we need to go through oops to keep them running, but: - Clients don't want to mo…
Are you sure you want to disclose your employer's security risks and tech debts on a public forum?
Sure, lying about some of the details while getting the gist across might be a good idea (e.g. naming a different OS when you actually have Ubuntu), but there definitely needs to be discourse about the circumstances that people are dealing with in reality, instead of everyone pretending that they are on the forefront of the industry with their security and other practices.
The more you think about it, the murkier everything gets - talking about how things were in a company 5 years ago that's now defunct might be the best possible circumstance, but in a currently active org that might also be a way of getting yourself sacked, depending on how juicy of a target it is and how much attention it attracts.
That said, the company has made the choice to use EOL software, their clients have made the choice to use EOL software and it's bad practices all around - honestly, should any of the software be exposed publicly, I'm pretty sure that this person's comments won't be the first to call attention to the setup, since nation X's hackers/crackers might have already ran automated attacks against it anyways.
In summary, bad practices probably deserve to get called out, just so we know what the situation in the industry is like in reality, but hopefully not at too great of a personal expense.
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#15> To load the rootkit into kernel space, it is necessary to approximately match the kernel version used for compiling; it does not have to be strictly the same. >> vermagic=2.6.32-696.23.1.el6.x86_64 SMP mod_unload modversions do you know why they say "approximately match"? I thought it had to match exactly so that the kernel accepts to load the module
The greater the difference between the kernel version you compiled for, and the kernel version you are trying to load it on, the greater the chance something you are relying on changed and the module loader cant resolve all the symbols and so it fails.
So saying a kmod has to match the kernel version is good practice but the reality is not quite as strict.
Red Hat has a list of "white listed" symbols that they try to maintain across a major version of RHEL so if your kmod only relies on them and nothing else then it should load on any kernel version within that release. But that's a Red Hat thing, not a Linux kernel thing.
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure you want to disclose your employer's security risks and tech debts on a public forum?
I think that as long as the person remains mostly anonymous (personally I've no interest in digging further, for this exact reason), things like this need to be talked about. Sure, lying about some of the details while getting the gist across might be a good idea (e.g. naming a different OS when you actually have Ubuntu), but there definitely needs to be discourse about the circumstances that people are dealing with…
About 1 million CentOS 6 boxes of some description hitting the update servers as of July 2021. Compared with roughly 2 million on v7 and half a million on v8.
Would be interesting to know how those percentages have changed since then.
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparatively, RHEL 6 is still kind of fine, at least it is still officially supported as virtualized OS in oVirt... We run a lot of CentOS 5 virtual machines (and some physical ones! ; and some RHEL4! , and a few Fedora core 8 and 4 !!!), with no end in sight... :( It is a huge concern for the Infra team, a source of many headaches, and we need to go through oops to keep them running, but: - Clients don't want to mo…
Are you sure you want to disclose your employer's security risks and tech debts on a public forum?
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#18$ du -sh /lib/modules/$(uname -r)
294M /lib/modules/5.10.0-15-amd64
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
RHEL 6 is in Extended Lifecycle Support until June 2024 (that is: customers with suitable subscriptions still get critical patches). It’s a zombie, but it’s not quite dead yet. I’d bet that there are still enough (+) people out there running it. (+) or rather too many.
There are paying customers. It might not be shiny/fun, but there is a reason Red Hat became the first one-billion dollar open-source company in 2012.
Re: Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparatively, RHEL 6 is still kind of fine, at least it is still officially supported as virtualized OS in oVirt... We run a lot of CentOS 5 virtual machines (and some physical ones! ; and some RHEL4! , and a few Fedora core 8 and 4 !!!), with no end in sight... :( It is a huge concern for the Infra team, a source of many headaches, and we need to go through oops to keep them running, but: - Clients don't want to mo…
Are you sure you want to disclose your employer's security risks and tech debts on a public forum?