The new threat took its name from Greek mythology, as the Kovaloi were cunning, tiny followers of Dionysus.
ESET researchers have discovered Kobalos, a malware that attacks high-performance supercomputers (HPCs). ESET has partnered with the CERN Computer Security Team and other organizations involved in dealing with attacks on scientific research networks. Among the targets were a major Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Asia, an endpoint security solution provider in North America, and several private servers.
ESET researchers have engineered reverse engineering this small but complex piece of malware that is portable to many operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Solaris, and possibly AIX and Windows.
“We named this malware Kobalos for its small code size and cunning methods. In Greek mythology, Kovalos is a small, cunning creature," explains Marc-Etienne Léveillé, who studyin Kobalos. "We should note that this level of sophistication is rarely seen in Linux malware," adds Léveillé.
Kobalos is a backdoor that contains commands that do not reveal the intent of attackers. "In short, Kobalos provides remote file system access, terminal session playback, and allows connections proxy to other Kobalos-infected servers,” says Léveillé.
Any server infected by Kobalos can be turned into a Command & Control (C&C) server. As the IP addresses and ports of the C&C server are integrated into the executable program, operators can then create new samples of Kobalos using this new C&C server. In addition, on most systems infected with Kobalos, the SSH client steals credentials.
“The credentials of those using the SSH client on an infected machine are logged. These credentials can then be used by attackers to install Kobalos on the new server,” adds Léveillé. THE creation two-factor authentication to connect to SSH servers will mitigate the threat, as using stolen credentials appears to be one of the ways it can spread to different systems.
More technical details about Kobalos can be found at blogpost “Kobalos - A complex Linux threat to high performance computing infrastructure”At WeLiveSecurity.
