The number of malware infections targeting UNIX devices rose by thirty-fifth in 2021, most ordinarily to recruit IoT devices for DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.
IoTs square measure generally under-powered "smart" devices running numerous UNIX distributions and square measure restricted to specific practicality. However, once their resources square measure combined into massive teams, they'll deliver large DDoS attacks to even well-protected infrastructure.
Besides DDoS, UNIX IoT devices square measure recruited to mine cryptocurrency, facilitate spam mail campaigns, function relays, act as command and management servers, or maybe act as entry points into company networks.
A Crowdstrike report trying into the attack knowledge from 2021 summarizes the following:
In 2021, there was a thirty-fifth rise in malware targeting UNIX systems compared to 2020.
XorDDoS, Mirai, and Mozi were the foremost prevailing families, accounting for twenty-second of all Linux-targeting malware attacks discovered in 2021.
Mozi, specifically, had explosive growth in its activity, with 10 times a lot of samples current within the wild the year that passed compared to the previous one.
XorDDoS additionally had a notable year-over-year increase of 123%.
Malware summary
XorDDoS may be a versatile UNIX trojan that works in multiple UNIX system architectures, from ARM (IoT) to x64 (servers). It uses XOR encoding for C2 communications, thence the name.
When assaultive IoT devices, XorDDoS brute-forces vulnerable devices via SSH. On UNIX machines, it uses port 2375 to achieve password-less root access to the host.
A notable case of the malware's distribution was shown in 2021 when a Chinese threat actor referred to as "Winnti" was discovered deploying it with alternative spinoff botnets.
Mozi may be a P2P botnet wishing on the distributed hash table (DHT) operation system to cover suspicious C2 communications from network traffic observance solutions.
The particular botnet has been around for a minute, regularly adding a lot of vulnerabilities and increasing its targeting scope.
DHT system enforced into Mozi
Mirai may be a disreputable botnet that spawned varied forks thanks to its public accessible ASCII text file that continues to plague the IoT world.
The various derivatives implement completely different C2 communication protocols, however, all of them generally abuse weak credentials to brute-force into devices.
We coated many notable Mirai variants in 2021, like "Dark Mirai," which focuses on home routers, and "Moobot," which targets cameras.
"Some of the foremost prevailing variants caterpillar-tracked by CrowdStrike researchers involve Sora, IZIH9, and Rekai," says CrowdStrike scientist Mihai Maganu within the report. "Compared to 2020, the numbers of known samples for all 3 variants have exaggerated by thirty-third, thirty-ninth, and eighty-three severally in 2021."
A trend that continues into 2022
The Crowstrike findings are not stunning as they ensure associate a progressing trend that emerged in previous years.
For example, an associate Intezer report analyzing 2020 stats found that UNIX malware families exaggerated by four-hundredth in 2020 compared to the previous year.
Linux malware families recorded in recent years
In the 1st six months of 2020, a steep rise of five hundredths in Golang malware was recorded, showing that malware authors were searching for ways in which to create their code run on multiple platforms.
This programming, and by extension, targeting trend, has already been confirmed in early 2022 cases and is probably going to continue intense.
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