In March 2025, Unit 42 researchers identified a wave of Prometei attacks. Prometei refers to both the botnet and the malware family used to operate it. This malware family, which includes both Linux and Windows variants, allows attackers to remotely control compromised systems for cryptocurrency mining (particularly Monero) and credential theft.
This article focuses on the resurgence of the Linux variant. Prometei is under active development, incorporating new modules and methods into its capabilities. The latest Prometei versions feature a backdoor that enables a variety of malicious activities. Threat actors employ a domain generation algorithm (DGA) for their command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and integrate self-updating features for stealth and evasion.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- Cyber security threat to Britain’s oil and gas sites as attack could cause ‘unprecedented damage’
August 17, 2018
Brian Lord OBE says a successful attack on its infrastructure could cause “unprecedented damage” and “unrest across the world”. With a complex ecosystem of computation, networking, and physical operational processes spread around the world the industry has a large attack surface with many attack vectors. A typical large oil and gas company uses half a million processors ...
- FBI Warns Of ATM Hacking Campaign
August 16, 2018
The FBI has warned banks that cybercriminals are preparing to carry out a “highly choreographed, global fraud scheme known as an ‘ATM cash-out’.” The threat, reported by Krebs On Security cybersecurity blog, will apparently see criminals hacking a bank or payment card processor, and using cloned cards at ATMs around the world to fraudulently withdraw “millions of ...
- Researchers Disclose New Foreshadow (L1TF) Vulnerabilities Affecting Intel CPUs
August 14, 2018
Academics and private sector researchers have revealed details today about three new vulnerabilities affecting Intel CPUs. All three are Spectre-class attacks that take advantage of a CPU design feature named speculative execution —a feature found in all modern CPUs that has the role of improving performance by computing operations in advance and later discarding unneeded data. These flaws target ...
- Postmortem of a Compromised MikroTik Router
August 14, 2018
Cryptocurrency coinminers are the new ransomware and malicious actors have already pounced on the opportunity to make their fortune. Symantec has been tracking a large-scale coin-mining campaign which, as per Shodan, has currently infected about 157,000 MikroTik routers. Researchers discovered this coin-mining campaign in early August 2018. The campaign was initially concentrated in Brazil; however, it soon began ...
- Victims Lose Access to Thousands of Photos as Instagram Hack Spreads
August 14, 2018
In a probable quest to build a botnet, someone is hacking Instagram accounts, deleting handles, avatars and personal details, and linking them to a new email address. An Instagram hack is spreading across the internet, with increasing numbers of victims finding their accounts hijacked and personal details altered — and account recovery so far impossible. Read more… Source: ...
- Researchers Developed Artificial Intelligence-Powered Stealthy Malware
August 9, 2018
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been seen as a potential solution for automatically detecting and combating malware, and stop cyber attacks before they affect any organization. However, the same technology can also be weaponized by threat actors to power a new generation of malware that can evade even the best cyber-security defenses and infects a computer network ...