- Researchers at the Black Lotus Labs pinpoint a new multifunctional Go-based malware named Chaos.
- It is designed to work across several architectures, including ARM, Intel (i386), MIPS, and PowerPC along with Windows and Linux.
- The team also found out that the malware is using China-based infrastructure for command and control communication.
Researchers at the Black Lotus Labs, the threat intelligence arm of Lumen Technologies, announced that they found a new multifunctional Go-based malware. It targets both Windows and Linux, along with software architectures used in routers. The Black Lotus Labs team also stated that there is a significant increase in malware written in the Go programming language due to its flexibility, low antivirus detection rates, and difficulty to reverse-engineer.
China-based infrastructure
The Black Lotus Labs team discovered and analyzed approximately 100 samples of the malware and show that it was named Chaos by the developers, which was written in Chinese. The malware is also using China-based infrastructure for command and control communication. Chaos is capable of enumerating the host environment, running remote shell commands, loading additional modules, automatically propagating through stealing, brute forcing SSH private keys, and launching DDoS attacks.
The team enumerated the C2s and targets of several distinct Chaos clusters by using Lumen global network visibility, which includes a compromise of a GitLab server and multiple DDoS attacks that happened recently. Its botnet infrastructure is relatively small, compared to other DDoS malware families but it demonstrated significant growth in the last few months. It can operate across many consumer and enterprise devices and its stealthy nature enabled this rapid growth. Black Lotus Lab said,
« While the shift to Go-based malware has been underway for the last few years, there are few strains that demonstrate the breadth of Chaos in terms of the wide array of architectures and operating systems it was designed to infect. Not only does it target enterprise and large organizations but also devices and systems that aren’t routinely monitored as part of an enterprise security model, such as SOHO routers and FreeBSD OS. And with a significant evolution from its predecessor, Chaos is achieving rapid growth since the first documented evidence of it in the wild.
Black Lotus Labs has null-routed the Chaos C2s across the Lumen global backbone and added the IoCs from this campaign into the threat intelligence feed that fuels the Lumen Connected Security portfolio. We will continue to monitor for new infrastructure, targeting activity, and expanding TTPs, as well as collaborate with the security research community to share findings related to this activity. »