Yesterday we discovered another client-side JavaScript attack targeting +500 websites, including governments and universities. The injected scripts create hidden links in the Document Object Model (DOM), pointing to external websites, a programming interface for web documents.
Cloud attack tool has been repurposed by multiple threat actors to push SMS spam and smishing campaigns through major SaaS providers.
Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list. The day before, he alerted Debian security and the (private) distros@openwall list. In his mail, he says that he dug into this after “observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors).”
At a high level, the attack is split in two pieces: a shell script and an object file. There is an injection of shell code during configure, which injects the shell code into make. The shell code during make adds the object file to the build. This post examines the shell script. (See also my timeline post.)
The ASEC analysis team recently discovered that a Linux malware developed with Shc has been installing a CoinMiner. It is presumed that after successful authentication through a dictionary attack on inadequately managed Linux SSH servers, various malware were installed on the target system. Among those installed were the Shc downloader, XMRig CoinMiner installed through the former, and DDoS IRC Bot, developed with Perl.
