Slashdot Mirror
Duqu Attackers Managed to Wipe C&C Servers
Trailrunner7 writes with an update in the saga of Duqu and Stuxnet. From the article: "Shortly after the first public reports about Duqu emerged in early autumn, the crew behind Duqu wiped out all of the command-and-control servers that had been in use up to that point, including some that had been used since 2009. An in-depth analysis of the known C&C servers used in the Duqu attacks has found that some of the servers were compromised as far back as 2009, and that the attackers clearly targeted Linux machines. All of the known Duqu C&C servers discovered up to this point have been running CentOS ... There also is some evidence that the attackers may have used a zero-day in OpenSSH 4.3 to compromise the C&C servers initially."
4.The servers appear to have been hacked by bruteforcing the root password. (We do not believe in the OpenSSH 4.3 0-day theory - that would be too scary!)
5.The attackers have a burning desire to update OpenSSH 4.3 to version 5 as soon as they get control of a hacked server.
Ah yes, lets pretend there is no problem because the idea that there is, is too scary. Someone kill me, please. The only other reason I can think of, which also ties in with the fact they were appently checking the man page for sshd_config is that something changes in the default settings between 4.8 and 5 and this they wanted desperately, but even then this would point to some sort of exploit. *(Maybe an exploit in the way the default settings are in centos, rather than in openssh).
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
It's just like any other OS. You need to know what your doing.
A poorly setup Linux box will be worse than a locked down Windows install. Everyone knows this.
To say Linux itself is inherently vulnerable is an ignorant statement.
-americamatrix