Security researchers have discovered a new worm and botnet dubbed Gitpaste-12, named for its usage of GitHub and Pastebin to host component code and the 12 known vulnerabilities it exploits to compromise systems.
The Juniper Threat Labs research team detected the first Gitpaste-12 attacks on Oct. 15, 2020; however, the team notes the first commit was seen on GitHub on July 9, meaning the malware had lived on GitHub since then. Researchers reported the Pastebin URL and git repo, which was closed on Oct. 30, 2020, and should stop the spread of the botnet.
Gitpaste-12 has 12 unique attack modules available, though researchers note there is evidence its development is ongoing. Its current targets are Linux-based x86 servers, and Linux ARM and MIPS-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
In the first phase of an attack, Gitpaste-12 attempts to use known exploits to compromise target systems and may attempt to brute-force passwords. After the initial compromise, the malware downloads a script from Pastebin; this calls the same script and executes it again every minute, researchers explain in a blog post. This is presumably how the botnet is updated.
The main shell script uploaded to the victim's machine during the attack starts to download and execute other part of Gitpaste-12. It also downloads and executes components from GitHub.
Following this, the malware prepares its target environment by eliminating system defenses such as firewall rules and common threat prevention and monitoring software. Researchers discovered a script that contains comments written in Chinese and commands to disable some security tools. In one example, commands disable cloud security agents, indicating t ..
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