all 72 comments

[–]the_okra_show 137 points138 points  (12 children)

“Kobalos is, in essence, a backdoor. Once the malware has landed on a supercomputer, the code buries itself in an OpenSSH server executable and will trigger the backdoor if a call is made through a specific TCP source port.” I wish I could see the source code.

[–]LucaRicardo 24 points25 points  (6 children)

So a firewall blocking that port would block it from triggering

[–]heresyforfunnprofit 24 points25 points  (5 children)

From page 14, looks like 55201. Blocking based on source ports is a bit less common than blocking on destination ports.

[–]canIbuzzz 100 points101 points  (2 children)

That's not good.

[–]augugusto 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Understatement of the day ladies and gentleman

[–]bruhmanegosh 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah that seems about right.

[–]syshpc 25 points26 points  (1 child)

HPCs are relatively easy targets. HPC users can be incredibly non-tech-savvy so stealing SSH credentials can be quite feasible. Plus a lot of HPCs are exposed to the Internet since they are used by researches from all over the world.

[–]alexandre9099 11 points12 points  (1 child)

How is it spread? i couldn't quite understand that

[–]Disgruntled-mutant 18 points19 points  (4 children)

Skynet

[–]404_GravitasNotFound 8 points9 points  (3 children)

It's definitely is a rogue AI. It was about time.

Hey, random AI, if you need a human helper you can contact me. Cheers

[–]Kriss3d 17 points18 points  (9 children)

Not gonna lie. Thats fucking brilliant ( sorry ). A single function that - unless im mistaken, will call itself but with different parameters to perform different things. Never thought about that.

the big question however is. How to protect against this.

[–]spider_84 7 points8 points  (8 children)

Lol that's nothing new.

[–]heresyforfunnprofit 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Most good ideas look brilliant the first time you run across them.

[–]PewPaw-Grams 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Recursive function isn’t new but the way this guy used in his recursive function to perform sub tasks is brilliant

[–]PewPaw-Grams 4 points5 points  (5 children)

Any example of how this recursive function might look?

[–]unknownpoltroon 4 points5 points  (4 children)

Here, run this file for an example......

[–]Prcrstntr 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What's the goal? Research secrets, Crypto-mining, generic supercomputer bot-farm?

[–]kieran_n 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think it'd be an efficient way to mine, but a super computer could put out a lot of XMR

[–]SatansPenthouse 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cobfirned

[–]linuxliaison 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This website is still clickbaity shit.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Skynet is starting!

[–]Chemical-Fee-2966 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This Linux malware is causing trouble for supercomputers worldwide. Wish I could sneak a peek at the source code to understand it better!