New Crypto Malware Spreading that Infects Linux Machines & Removes Anti-Virus

Researchers discovered a new crypto mining malware that infecting Linux users and other network users in order to mining cryptocurrency and disable the Anti-viruses from targeted systems.

Cybercriminals also using a backdoor family in this attack that more often used to perform DDOS attack for Linux based targeted network.

Also, the Malware developed with several components and its keep communicate with C2 servers to download the new modules whenever it needed.

In order to load modules, it keeps looking the folder in the disk which contains write permission to load its Malicious module.

This Malware mainly spreading to mine Monero (XMR) and it was written as a shell script that containing over 1,000 lines of code.

Security researchers from Dr .web detected and named this malware as Linux.BtcMine.174 and its mining the cryptocurrency covertly without letting users know.

Crypto-Malware Infection Process

Initially, once the Trojan installed into the system it checks for other miners to terminate them, also the malware is capable of exploiting the number of privilege escalation vulnerabilities in order to launch as a root.

Based on the researcher’s findings, this malware using 2 Linux exploits  CVE-2016-5195 (also known as DirtyCow) and Linux.Exploit.CVE-2013-2094.

In this case, malware taking advantages of “Dirty COW” , a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux Kernel and the Trojan downloads DirtyCow source files from the Internet and compiles them right on an infected machine.

Later on, the malware tries to find the antivirus services name including safedog, aegis, yunsuo, clamd, avast, avgd, cmdavd, cmdmgd, drweb-configd, drweb-spider-kmod, esets, and xmirrord.

According to Dr. web, if the malware detects antivirus then the Trojan does not simply end the antivirus’s process but also uses package managers to remove its files as well as the directory in which the product was installed.

Malware adds the autorun list to downloads and launches a rootkit on the infected device that has an ability steal user-entered passwords for the su command and to hide files in the file system, network connections, and running processes.

Apart from that Trojan collects data on hosts the machine had previously connected to via SSH and tries to infect them and launches a Monero (XMR) miner in the system.

Also, Malware keeps checking the system that miner running every time and also it has the ability to restart the system.

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