Stantinko Bots Targets Russia

An adware and coin-miner botnet targeting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. the trojan masquerades as HTTPd, a commonly used program on Linux servers, and is a new version of the malware belonging to a threat actor tracked as Stantinko.

Stantinko has been traditionally a Windows malware, the expansion in their toolset to target Linux didn’t go unnoticed, but observed to be a Linux proxy version .

Upon execution, “httpd” validates a configuration file located in “etc/pd.d/proxy.conf” that’s delivered along with the malware, following it up by creating a socket and a listener to accept connections from what the researchers believe are other infected systems.

An HTTP Post request from an infected client paves the way for the proxy to pass on the request to an attacker-controlled server, which then responds with an appropriate payload that’s forwarded by the proxy back to the client.

In the event a non-infected client sends an HTTP Get request to the compromised server, an HTTP 301 redirect to a preconfigured URL specified in the configuration file is sent back.

Stating that the new version of the malware only functions as a proxy, Stantinko is the latest malware targeting Linux servers to fly under the radar, alongside threats such as Doki, IPStorm and RansomEXX.