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Coin-mining malware jumps from ARM IoT gear to Intel servers

Akamai senior security researcher Larry Cashdollar says one of his honeypot systems recently turned up what appears to be an IoT malware that targets Intel machines running Linux.

"I suspect it’s probably a derivate of other IoT crypto mining botnets," Cashdollar told The Register. "This one seems to target enterprise systems."

In addition to being fine-tuned for Intel x86 and 686 processors, the malware looks to establish an SSH Port 22 connection and deliver itself as a gzip archive. From there, the malware checks to see if the machine has already been infected (at which point the installation stops) or if an earlier version is running and needs to be terminated. From there, three different directories are created with different versions of the same files.

"Each directory contains a variation of the XMrig v2.14.1 cryptocurrency miner in either x86 32bit or 64bit format," the Akamai security ace explained. "Some of the binaries are named after common Unix utilities, like ps, in an attempt to blend into a normal process list."

Following that step, the malware looks to install the cryptocurrency mining tool itself and modify the host system's crontab file to make sure the malware runs even after a reboot. Additionally, the malware installs a shell script that allows it to communicate with the command and control server.

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