Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections
arstechnica.com
Malicious code planted in xz Utils has been circulating for more than a month.

Malicious code planted in xz Utils has been circulating for more than a month.

    • bleistift2@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      That’s it! Thank you!

      Transcription:

      Downloaded a virus for Linux lately and unpacked it.

      Tried to run as root, didn’t work.

      Googled for 2 hours, found out that instead of /usr/local/bin the virus unpacked to /usr/bin for which the user malware doesn’t have any write permissions, therefore the virus couldn’t create a process file.

      Found patched .configure and .make files on some Chinese forum, recompiled and rerun it.

      The virus said it needs the library cmalw-lib-2.0. Turns out cmalw-lib-2.0 is shipped with CentOS but not with Ubuntu. Googled for hours again and found an instruction to build a .deb package from source.

      The virus finally started, wrote some logs, made a core dump and crashed. After 1 hour of going through the logs I discovered the virus assumed it was running on ext4 and called into its disk encryption API. Under btrfs this API is deprecated. The kernel noticed and made this partition read-only.

      Opened the sources, grep’ed the Bitcoin wallet and set $5 out of pity.