Shouldn’t be this hard to find out the attack vector.
Buried deep, deep in their writeup:
RocketMQ servers
- CVE-2021-4043 (Polkit)
- CVE-2023-33246
I’m sure if you’re running other insecure, public facing web servers with bad configs, the actor could exploit that too, but they didn’t provide any evidence of this happening in the wild (no threat group TTPs for initial access), so pure FUD to try to sell their security product.
Unfortunately, Ars mostly just restated verbatim what was provided by the security vendor Aqua Nautilus.
There’s also a buried reference to using a several-years-patched gpac bug to gain root access before this thing can do most of its stealth stuff.
Basically, it needs your system to already have a known, unpatched RCE bug before it can get a foothold, and if you’ve got one of those you have problems that go way beyond stealth crypto miners stealing electricity.
Can’t be infected if I keep wiping my partition for a new shiny distro
Your install USB is infected by a rookit and reinstalls itself on connect.
Jokes on you, the rootkit is likely my own and I just forgot about it.
