ssh security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Embedded Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become the target of a new botnet dubbed PumaBot . Written in Go, the botnet is designed to conduct brute-force attacks against SSH instances to expand in size and scale and deliver additional malware to the infected hosts. "Rather than scanning the internet, the malware retrieves a list of targets from a command-and-control (C2) server and attempts to brute force SSH credentials," Darktrace said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "Upon gaining access, it receives remote commands and establishes persistence using system service files." The botnet malware is designed to obtain initial access via successfully brute-forcing SSH credentials across a list of harvested IP addresses with open SSH ports. The list of IP addresses to target is retrieved from an external server ("ssh.ddos-cc[.]org"). As part of its brute-force attempts, the malware also performs various checks to determine if...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of continued risks posed by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) malware known as XorDDoS , with 71.3 percent of the attacks between November 2023 and February 2025 targeting the United States. "From 2020 to 2023, the XorDDoS trojan has increased significantly in prevalence," Cisco Talos researcher Joey Chen said in a Thursday analysis.  "This trend is not only due to the widespread global distribution of the XorDDoS trojan but also an uptick in malicious DNS requests linked to its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. In addition to targeting commonly exposed Linux machines, the trojan has expanded its reach to Docker servers, converting infected hosts into bots." Nearly 42 percent of the compromised devices are located in the United States, followed by Japan, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Morocco, and China. XorDDoS is a well-known malware that has a track record of striking Linux systems for over a decade. In May 2022...

A new study has demonstrated that it's possible for passive network attackers to obtain private RSA host keys from a vulnerable SSH server by observing when naturally occurring computational faults that occur while the connection is being established. The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is a method for securely transmitting commands and logging in to a computer over an unsecured network. Based on a client-server architecture, SSH uses cryptography to authenticate and encrypt connections between devices. A host key is a cryptographic key used for authenticating computers in the SSH protocol. Host keys are key pairs that are typically generated using public-key cryptosystems like RSA . "If a signing implementation using CRT-RSA has a fault during signature computation, an attacker who observes this signature may be able to compute the signer's private key," a group of academics from the University of California, San Diego, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology said ...

A set of 36-year-old vulnerabilities has been uncovered in the Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) implementation of many client applications that can be exploited by malicious servers to overwrite arbitrary files in the SCP client target directory unauthorizedly. Session Control Protocol (SCP), also known as secure copy, is a network protocol that allows users to securely transfer files between a local host and a remote host using RCP (Remote Copy Protocol) and SSH protocol. In other terms, SCP, which dates back to 1983, is a secure version of RCP that uses authentication and encryption of SSH protocol to transfer files between a server and a client. Discovered by Harry Sintonen, one of F-Secure's Senior Security Consultants, the vulnerabilities exist due to poor validations performed by the SCP clients, which can be abused by malicious servers or man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attackers to drop or overwrite arbitrary files on the client's system. "Many scp clients fail to ver...

A four-year-old severe vulnerability has been discovered in the Secure Shell (SSH) implementation library known as Libssh that could allow anyone to completely bypass authentication and gain unfettered administrative control over a vulnerable server without requiring a password. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10933 , is an authentication-bypass issue that was introduced in Libssh version 0.6 released earlier 2014, leaving thousands of enterprise servers open to hackers for the last four years. But before you get frightened, you should know that neither the widely used OpenSSH nor Github's implementation of libssh was affected by the vulnerability. The vulnerability resides due to a coding error in Libssh and is "ridiculously simple" to exploit. According to a security advisory published Tuesday, all an attacker needs to do is sending an "SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS" message to a server with an SSH connection enabled when it expects an ...

A simple but highly critical vulnerability recently disclosed in the most widely used OpenSSH software allows attackers to try thousands of password login attempts per connection in a short period. OpenSSH is the most popular software widely used for secure remote access to Linux-based systems. Generally, the software allows 3 to 6 Password login attempts before closing a connection, but a new vulnerability lets attackers perform thousands of authentication requests remotely . OpenSSH servers with keyboard-interactive authentication enabled , including FreeBSD Linux, can be exploited to carry out the brute force attack on OpenSSH protocol, a security researcher with online alias KingCope explained in a blog post . Exploit for the Vulnerability RELEASED  Hackers could widely exploit the vulnerability because the keyboard-interactive authentication is by default enabled on most of the systems. Researcher has also released a proof-of-concept exploit code, whi...