Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.zip

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

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[-] atkion@sh.itjust.works 25 points 3 months ago

[-] bleistift2@feddit.de 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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.

this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024

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