Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have uncovered a new malware that has the ability to infect systems running Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, with the goal of launching DDoS attacks.
According to Kaspersky Lab, the malware is written entirely in Java and does require that Java is installed on the host system in order to run. Once the malware successfully infects a system, however, it can launch DDoS attacks using both HTTP and UDP floods.
Identified by Kaspersky Lab as HEUR:Backdoor.Java.Agent.a, the malware exploits CVE-2013-2465, a critical Java vulnerability with a CVSS base score of 10.0 that was patched by Oracle in June.
Interestingly, the bot is controlled using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol and uses the PircBot open framework to facilitate communication through IRC. Additionally, Kaspersky researchers found that the malware uses the “Zelix Klassmaster obfuscator” to prevent it from being reverse engineered by researchers and competing cybercrimnals.
“Zelix generates a different key for each class – which means that in order to decrypt all the strings in the application, you have to analyze all the classes in order to find the decryption keys,” Anton Ivanov, a Kaspersky Lab Expert, explained in a blog post.
The malware sample was provided to Kaspersky Lab by Zoltan Balazs, CTO at MRG Effitas, an independent IT security research organization.
Additional details on the cross-platform malware are available on Kaspersky Lab’s Securelist.
Related: Multi-Platform Java Exploit Targets Macs, Linux, Windows