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Powerful Malware Disguised as Crypto Miner Infects 1M+ Windows, Linux PCs (www.pcmag.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

.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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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

Maybe if root is shared via SMB1 and is rw

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

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.

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

Users can configure the system however they want.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

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.