Botnets can also be used to compromise other devices, and XorDdos is known for using Secure Shell (SSH) brute force attacks to gain remote control on target devices.
SSH is one of the most common protocols in IT infrastructures and enables encrypted communications over insecure networks for remote system administration purposes, making it an attractive vector for attackers.
Once XorDdos identifies valid SSH credentials, it uses root privileges to run a script that downloads and installs XorDdos on the target device.
XorDdos uses evasion and persistence mechanisms that allow its operations to remain robust and stealthy.
Its evasion capabilities include obfuscating the malware’s activities, evading rule-based detection mechanisms and hash-based malicious file lookup, as well as using anti-forensic techniques to break process tree-based analysis.
Microsoft observed in recent campaigns that XorDdos hides malicious activities from analysis by overwriting sensitive files with a null byte.
It also includes various persistence mechanisms to support different Linux distributions.