Researchers Share Roadmap for Strengthening Linux Defenses

BlackBerry threat researchers have shared common tactics and strategies to better protect Linux systems from cyberattacks. To create a viable way to security, researchers investigated three ransomware families Symbiote, Orbit, and Red Alert ransomware.

According to the researchers, the most important tactics to focus on are MITRE TA0005 (defense) invasion and TA0007 (discovery). The above tactic represents events early in the attack chain and if it is detected in time, defenders can help to mitigate activities such as access permissions, lateral movement or lateral movement. It also helps to mitigate an attack before a ransomware payload is launched.

Tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers to bypass detection use tools such as cURL and Wget, which are used to pull files, proxy scripts, especially SOCKS5 proxies, reverse or otherwise, and toolkits.

The researchers pointed out that attackers are now targeting virtual environments VMs in the private cloud. Attackers are targeting the hypervisors to compromise the entire VM infrastructure instead of encrypting the file on a single virtual machine.

They found that two of the largest ransomware families (LockBit and BlackBasta) now have ESXi-specific variants as well as Linux variants for encryption.

Countermeasures to protect against these attacks include preparing for a possible attack and conducting Purple Team tests to emulate threat actors, determine effectiveness and assess gaps.

Other tips include avoiding the use of generic playbooks to protect against ransomware; evaluating recovery plans and posture, early and often; the application of a zero-trust approach to network and data access; the reduction of the attack surface and the application of a policy with the least privileges, as well as the timely application of patches.

The sources for this piece include an article in BlackBerry.