full-disclosure - linux rootkit in combination with nginx

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Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:19:26 +0100
From: stack trace <stacktrace44@...il.com>
To: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: linux rootkit in combination with nginx

Hi there,

We've discovered something which looks to us like a rootkit working
together with proxy software like nginx. Our OS is debian squeeze and nginx
1.2.3.

Here is what happened:

We are running a web service and we got notified by some customers of us
that they are getting redirected to some malicious sites. Somehow a hacker
managed to inject an iframe into our http responses.

I tried to do a telnet test on our nginx proxy and saw that even the "bad
request" response which gets served directly from nginx contained the
malicious iframe code.

server {
    listen          80 default backlog=2048;
    listen          443 default backlog=2048 ssl;
    server_name     _;
    access_log      off;
    (...)
    location / {
        return  400;
    }
}

Doing a bad request nginx doesn't go to cache in this case - the "return
400" makes nginx reply with a predefined response (a string in memory).

Even this response contained an iframe like this:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: nginx/1.2.3
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:01:24 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 353
Connection: close

<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white"><style><iframe src="http://malware-site/index.php
"></iframe></div>
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.2.3</center>

We've done an strace on the running nginx process and discovered that the
reply of the process actually didn't contain the malicious iframe.

writev(3, [{"HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request\r\nServer"..., 151},
{"<html>\r\n<head><title>400 Bad Req"..., 120},
{"<hr><center>nginx/1.2.4</center>"..., 52}], 3) = 323

After a bit deeper digging we've found some kernel rootkit I've attached to
this email and also some hidden processes were running on our proxy machine
with names like write_startup_c and get_http_inj_fr (which sounds like what
happened to us).

Is this a known attack / rootkit etc or did we discover something new?

Cheers,
-stacktrace

Content of type "text/html" skipped

Download attachment "lib+modules+2.6.32-5-amd64+kernel+sound+module_init.lo" of type "application/octet-stream" (689742 bytes)

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