[CIA Outlaw Country Attack Against CentOS / Rhel (and Fedora?) Is This Credible?]

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Do you know this?
Dario

——- Messaggio inoltrato ——-
Da: stan
Reply-to: Community support for Fedora users

A: users@lists.fedoraproject.org Oggetto: CIA Outlaw Country attack against CentOS / Rhel (and Fedora?)
Is this credible?
Data: Thu, 29 Jun 2017 15:51:43 -0700

Wikileaks released a document about an attack against CentOS / Rhel.

https://wikileaks.org/vault7/#OutlawCountry

Here’s the text, there are some docs there also.

OutlawCountry
29 June, 2017

Today, June 29th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the OutlawCountry project of the CIA that targets computers running the Linux operating system. OutlawCountry allows for the redirection of all outbound network traffic on the target computer to CIA controlled machines for ex- and infiltration purposes. The malware consists of a kernel module that creates a hidden netfilter table on a Linux target;
with knowledge of the table name, an operator can create rules that take precedence over existing netfilter/iptables rules and are concealed from an user or even system administrator.

The installation and persistence method of the malware is not described in detail in the document; an operator will have to rely on the available CIA exploits and backdoors to inject the kernel module into a target operating system. OutlawCountry v1.0 contains one kernel module for 64-bit CentOS/RHEL 6.x; this module will only work with default kernels. Also, OutlawCountry v1.0 only supports adding covert DNAT
rules to the PREROUTING chain.

My first take is that this doesn’t represent a very serious threat.  Do you disagree?

3 thoughts on - [CIA Outlaw Country Attack Against CentOS / Rhel (and Fedora?) Is This Credible?]

  • “For operational use, shell access is assumed, and root privileges are required.”

    It’s not much of a secret that you can mess with a system if you have root access…

    Yves Bellefeuille

  • The module doesn’t represent an unknown security flaw, so my inclination is to say “no.” I’d also note that if your systems aren’t extremely old, they probably boot via UEFI, and support Secure Boot. Such a system will not load unsigned modules.