Linux not so pure and safe after all

For almost as long as there has been OS wars the mantra of the penguin herders has been that the likelihood of Linux ever being vulnerable to tings like viruses and trojans was next to nil. This was something that they liked to hold over the heads of all us dumb Windows users – much like the Mac contingent does as well.

How many times have we heard the chant … “you want to be safe use Linux – Windoze is for losers” or some such similar childishness?

Well now Windows users can tell all those Linux lording geeks to stuff it because just as with any operating system there are weaknesses that can be exploited (usually the person behind the keyboard) and Linux is no different. Regardless of how the Tux lovers might pontificate about the security of Linux the fact is that Linux can be exploited which is exactly what a security researcher has found with the discovery of a cluster of Linux servers that is being used as a special ops kind of botnet. As well it is being used to distribute malware to unsuspecting web surfers.

Each of the infected machines examined so far is a dedicated or virtual dedicated server running a legitimate website, Denis Sinegubko, an independent researcher based in Magnitogorsk, Russia, told The Register. But in addition to running an Apache webserver to dish up benign content, they’ve also been hacked to run a second webserver known as nginx, which serves malware.

“What we see here is a long awaited botnet of zombie web servers! A group of interconnected infected web servers with [a] common control center involved in malware distribution,” Sinegubko wrote here. “To make things more complex, this botnet of web servers is connected with the botnet of infected home computer(s).”

Source: The Register – Linux webserver botnet pushes malware

While it is unclear how the infection began Sinegubko suggests that it may be because on nothing more than careless administrators who had their passwords sniffed – hence my comment about the biggest security weakness being from behind the keyboard regardless of operating system. Current the network consists of about 100 nodes running the Apache webserver on different distros of Linux.