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