In their first article on the XZ backdoor, Kaspersky researchers analyzed its code from initial infection to the function hooking it performs. As they mentioned then, its initial goal was to successfully hook one of the functions related to RSA key manipulation.
In this article, the research team will focus on the backdoor’s behaviour inside OpenSSH, specifically OpenSSH portable version 9.7p1 – the most recent version at this time. To better understand what’s going on, they recommend you to read Baeldung’s article about SSH authentication methods and JFrog’s article about privilege separation in SSH.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Related:
- Adversary Infrastructure Report 2020: A Defender’s View
January 8, 2021
Recorded Future tracks the creation and modification of new malicious infrastructure for a multitude of post-exploitation toolkits, custom malware frameworks, and open-source remote access trojans. The effort has been ongoing since 2017, when Insikt Group created methodologies to identify the deployments of open-source remote access trojans (RATs). Recorded Future collected over 10,000 unique command and control ...
- Malware uses WiFi BSSID for victim identification
January 4, 2021
Malware operators who want to know the location of the victims they infect usually rely on a simple technique where they grab the victim’s IP address and check it against an IP-to-geo database like MaxMind’s GeoIP to get a victim’s approximate geographical location. While the technique isn’t very accurate, it is still the most reliable method ...
- Agent Tesla Keylogger Gets Data Theft and Targeting Update
December 15, 2020
Six-year-old keylogger malware called Agent Tesla has been updated again, this time with expanded targeting and improved data exfiltration features. Agent Tesla first came into the scene in 2014, specializing in keylogging (designed to record keystrokes made by a user in order to exfiltrate data like credentials and more) and data-stealing. Since then keylogger has only ...
- Using MITRE ATT&CK to Identify an APT Attack
December 15, 2020
Security teams and researchers depend on publicly documented analyses of tools, routines, and behaviors to update themselves on the latest findings in the cybersecurity landscape. Published information serves as a reference for the known tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to install defenses against advance persistent threats (APTs) and prevent attacks that are likely to occur ...
- Investigating the Gootkit Loader
December 11, 2020
Since October 2020, we saw an increase in the number of Gootkit cases targeting users in Germany. We investigated this development and found that the Gootkit loader was now capable of sophisticated behavior that enabled it to surreptitiously load itself onto an affected system and make analysis and detection more difficult. This capability was used to ...
- MountLocker ransomware gets slimmer, now encrypts fewer files
December 11, 2020
MountLocker ransomware received an update recently that cut its size by half but preserves a weakness that could potentially allow learning the random key used to encrypt files. This ransomware operation started in July 2020, and it targets corporate networks. Its operators steal data before encrypting it and threaten victims to leak files unless their multi-million ...