By Augusto Remillano II and Jakub Urbanec (Threat Analysts)
Cryptocurrency-mining malware is still a prevalent threat, as illustrated by our detections of this threat in the first half of 2019. Cybercriminals, too, increasingly explored new platforms and ways to further cash in on their malware — from mobile devices and Unix and Unix-like systems to servers and cloud environments.
They also constantly hone their malware’s resilience against detection. Some, for instance, bundle their malware with a watchdog component that ensures that the illicit cryptocurrency mining activities persist in the infected machine, while others, affecting Linux-based systems, utilize an LD_PRELOAD-based userland rootkit to make their components undetectable by system monitoring tools.
Skidmap, a Linux malware that we recently stumbled upon, demonstrates the increasing complexity of recent cryptocurrency-mining threats. This malware is notable because of the way it loads malicious kernel modules to keep its cryptocurrency mining operations under the radar.
These kernel-mode rootkits are not only more difficult to detect compared to its user-mode counterparts — attackers can also use them to gain unfettered access to the affected system. A case in point: the way Skidmap can also set up a secret master password that gives ..
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