antiX was installed from the shipped ISO. It was the only OS on the system, so the risk of cross contamination is vanishingly small.
Once the basic installation was completed, the standard apt update and upgrade procedure was conducted to bring the antiX and Debian software up to date. Some time afterwards (varying from a few minutes to many hours), an unathorised ssh session was started. This contacted a remote address. The remote address also varies, but always points to various locations in China.
The results of the connection are not always successful or obvious. When successful, changes are made to
/etc/rc.local
/var/spool/cron/
/var/spool/cron/crontabs/
The alterations appear to be designed to drop the defences of the local system and allow (re)infection of a trojan. These changes are not always apparent until after a reboot and again may take minutes or hours to show up.
I have not been able to pin down which package delivers this threat, nor have I been able to create an uncompromised system after numerous attempts.
The following procedure has consistently produced an undesirable outcome.
Installed via shipped ISO
antiX-13.2-Full-Stable (Wheezy)
After Installation Finished
Reboot (power on warm boot)
Reboot (power off cold boot)
Changes Made to Installed Packages
None
Third Party Software Installed
None
Repos Status
deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://antix.daveserver.info/stable"
linktext was:"http://antix.daveserver.info/stable"
====================================
stable main
deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/"
linktext was:"http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/"
====================================
wheezy main contrib non-free
deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://security.debian.org/"
linktext was:"http://security.debian.org/"
====================================
wheezy/updates main contrib non-free
Establish What is to be Upgraded
Code: Select all
apt-get update
apt-get --simulate upgrade
...
The following packages have been kept back:
iceweasel
The following packages will be upgraded:
acpi-fakekey acpi-support acpi-support-base antix-libs apt apt-utils base-files connectshares-antix cups cups-client cups-common cups-filters cups-ppdc dbus dbus-x11 desktop-defaults-full-antix dpkg faq-docs-antix ffmpeg file gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gnupg gnupg-agent gnupg-curl gnupg2 gpgv gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad icewmcc-antix install-meta-antix libapt-inst1.5 libapt-pkg4.12 libav-tools libavcodec53 libavdevice53 libavfilter2 libavformat53 libavutil51 libc-bin libc6 libcups2 libcupscgi1 libcupsfilters1 libcupsimage2 libcupsmime1 libcupsppdc1 libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libgimp2.0 libgnutls26 libgssapi-krb5-2 libgstreamer-plugins-bad0.10-0 libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-bin libgtk-3-common libjbig0 libjpeg62 libjpeg8 libk5crypto3 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 liblcms2-2 liblua5.1-0 liblzo2-2 libmagic1 libmms0 libnss3 libopenjpeg2 libpixman-1-0 libpostproc52 libpurple0 libquvi-scripts ibrsvg2-2 librsvg2-common libsmbclient libsoup-gnome2.4-1 libsoup2.4-1 libssl1.0.0 libswscale2 libwbclient0 libxfont1 libxine1 libxine1-bin libxine1-ffmpeg libxine1-misc-plugins libxine1-plugins libxml2 libxmmsclient6 links2 live-usb-gui-antix locales menu-fluxbox-antix menu-icewm-antix menu-jwm-antix mobile-broadband-provider-info mountbox-antix mp3gain multiarch-support newsbeuter openssh-client openssh-server openssl pidgin pidgin-data python-imaging python-libxml2 python-lxml python2.7 python2.7-minimal rxvt-unicode samba-common samba-common-bin smbclient smxi-inxi-antix spacefm transmission transmission-cli transmission-common transmission-daemon transmission-gtk tzdata udevil udisks wget whois xserver-common xserver-xorg-core xsw yad
130 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
...
apt-get upgrade
Result
Upgrade completed without errors
Restart System
Reboot (power off cold boot)
Monitor System
Start htop, put in tree mode and watch /usr/sbin/sshd
As root start netstat -Wpc to display the address to which sshd connects
When the address is known verify its location
Open Iceweasel at
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.en.utrace.de"
linktext was:"http://www.en.utrace.de"
====================================
, enter the ip address and search.
Verify whether the connection delivered its payload.
Note: delivery is not always successful.
Reboot (power off cold boot)
cat /etc/rc.local, should usually not contain any extra commands
ls /var/spool/cron/, should usually not contain a file named root
ls /var/spool/cron/crontab/, should usually not contain a file named root