Elastic Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new Linux rootkit called PUMAKIT that comes with capabilities to escalate privileges, hide files and directories, and conceal itself from system tools, while simultaneously evading detection. "PUMAKIT is a sophisticated loadable kernel module (LKM) rootkit that employs advanced stealth mechanisms to hide its presence and maintain communication with command-and-control servers," Elastic Security Lab researchers Remco Sprooten and Ruben Groenewoud said in a technical report published Thursday. The company's analysis comes from artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal malware scanning platform earlier this September. The internals of the malware is based on a multi-stage architecture that comprises a dropper component named "cron," two memory-resident executables ("/memfd:tgt" and "/memfd:wpn"), an LKM rootkit ("puma.ko"), and a shared object (SO) userland rootkit called Kitsune ("li...