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Proof-of-Concept Linux Rootkit Leverages GPUs For Stealth
itwbennett writes: A team of developers has created a rootkit for Linux systems that uses the processing power and memory of graphics cards instead of CPUs in order to remain hidden. The rootkit, called Jellyfish, is a proof of concept designed to demonstrate that completely running malware on GPUs is a viable option. Such threats could be more sinister than traditional malware programs, according to the Jellyfish developers, in part because there are no tools to analyze GPU malware, they said.
Really, there's no reason to single this out as Linux. It could be done to any OS. I would imagine the first ones we see in the wild will target Windows.
Remember still that GPU shines at mathematics stuff. You feed it some matrices and tell to do some transformation on them, and it's extremely fast. But any kind of branching, while possible, is very slow. It's hard to make Windows Task Manager a program that runs well on a GPU.