Quote:Armed with an impressive bag of exploits and other tricks for propagation, researchers believe the new trojan could be the catalyst for an upcoming, major cyber-offensive.

A backdoor trojan dubbed “SpeakUp” has been spotted exploiting the Linux servers that run more than 90 percent of the top 1 million domains in the U.S. It uses a complex bag of tricks to infect hosts and to propagate, which analysts say could indicate that it’s poised for a major offensive involving a vast number of infected hosts, potentially worldwide.

According to Check Point research released Monday at the CPX360 event in Las Vegas, SpeakUp (so-named after its command-and-control domain, SpeakUpOmaha[dot]com) is being used in a cryptomining campaign that is gaining momentum and has targeted more than 70,000 servers worldwide so far in what could be the foundation for a very formidable botnet.

SpeakUp targets on-premises servers as well as cloud-based machines, such as those hosted by Amazon Web Services; and, it doesn’t stop at Linux: It also has the ability to infect MacOS devices.