From securityaffairs.co
Malware researchers at the Cybaze ZLab- Yoroi team spotted a new variant of the dangerous APT28 Lojax rootkit.
A new variant of the infamous APT28 Lojax (aka Double-Agent) has been discovered by the Cybaze ZLab – Yoroi team. It is the latest version of the well-known rootkit Double-Agent, previously analyzed by ESET researchers.
The behavior of the Lojax sample seems to be similar to the previous versions and exploits the legitimate “Absolute Lojack” software to grant its persistence on the infected system. Lojack is an anti-theft and localization software developed by Absolute Software Corporation and it is pre-installed in the BIOS image of several Lenovo, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Asus machines. In the past, this software was known as “Computrace”.
Despite its legitimate purposes, the Absolute Lojack software acts like a rootkit (more precisely as a bootkit): its BIOS component forces the writing of a small agent named “rpcnetp.exe” into the system folder. The agent periodically contacts the Absolute server and sends to it the current machine’s position.