Linux Malware Deemed ‘Nearly Impossible’ to Detect

upstart writes:

Linux Malware Deemed 'Nearly Impossible' to Detect:

Symbiote, discovered in November, parasitically infects running processes so it can steal credentials, gain rootlkit[sic] functionality and install a backdoor for remote access.

A new Linux malware that's "nearly impossible to detect" can harvest credentials and gives attackers remote access and rootkit functionality by acting in a parasitic way to infect targets, researchers said.

Researchers from The BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team have been tracking the malware, the earliest detection of which is from November 2021, security researcher Joakim Kennedy wrote in a blog post on the BlackBerry Threat Vector Blog published last week.

Researchers have appropriately dubbed the malware-which apparently was written to target the financial sector in Latin America-"Symbiote." In biology, the word means an organism that lives in symbiosis with another organism.

"What makes Symbiote different ... is that it needs to infect other running processes to inflict damage on infected machines," he wrote. "Instead of being a standalone executable file that is run to infect a machine, it is a shared object (SO) library that is loaded into all running processes using LD_PRELOAD (T1574.006), and parasitically infects the machine."

Once Symbiote has infected all the running processes, a threat actor can engage in various nefarious activity, including rootkit functionality, the ability to harvest credentials, and remote access capability, Kennedy said.

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