One of the comments from under the arsetechnica article mentions possibility of corporate espionage…I’m inclined to believe that, but obviously that’s pure speculation.
As one commenter on the site points out, this is not a backdoor in any meaningful sense of the word, because it still has to be snuck onto the machine. Malware, yes. Backdoor, no.
if you could run an app to compare your network traffic with what your router or switch shows that would be a dead giveaway, but also would require tools that I’m not sure exist right now
So what can you do about it? Tripwire checksumming your whole system is probably a good countermeasure, but if you’re already infiltrated, you’re probably fucked. As with all rootkits.
With the help of LD_PRELOAD, Symbiote will load before any other shared objects. That allows the malware to tamper with other library files loaded for an application. The image below shows a summary of all of the malware’s evasion techniques.
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
One of the comments from under the arsetechnica article mentions possibility of corporate espionage…I’m inclined to believe that, but obviously that’s pure speculation.
As one commenter on the site points out, this is not a backdoor in any meaningful sense of the word, because it still has to be snuck onto the machine. Malware, yes. Backdoor, no.
if you could run an app to compare your network traffic with what your router or switch shows that would be a dead giveaway, but also would require tools that I’m not sure exist right now
https://www.intezer.com/blog/research/new-linux-threat-symbiote/
So what can you do about it? Tripwire checksumming your whole system is probably a good countermeasure, but if you’re already infiltrated, you’re probably fucked. As with all rootkits.
uuuuh