I laughed and my partner ask why. I told her it’s some really nerdy humor. She was fine not hearing the joke, but I loosely explained it anyway. She humored me anyway. She’s a good woman.

It’s like that guy that posted an example Bitcoin miner on GitHub, then a bunch of script kiddies forgot to change his wallet info for their own before deploying… He made a good chunk of change by doing nothing malicious.

So, essentially, really poorly written malware? Given the number of assumptions it makes without any sort of robustness around system configuration it’s about as good as any first-pass bash script.

It’d be a stretch to call it malware, it’s probably an outright fabrication to call it a virus.

Text version:

Downloaded a virus for Linux lately and unpacked it. Tried to run it as root, didn’t work. Googled for 2 hours, found out that instead of /usr/local/bin the virus unpacked to /usr/bin for which the user malware doesn’t have any write permissions, therefore the virus couldn’t create a process file. Found patched .configure and .make files on some Chinese forum, recompiled and rerun it. The virus said it needs the library cmalw-lib-2.0.Turns out cmalw-lib-2.0 is shipped with CentOS but not with Ubuntu. Googled for hours again and found an instruction to build a.deb package from source. The virus finally started, wrote some logs, made a core dump and crashed. After 1 hour of going through the logs I discovered the virus assumed it was running on ext4 and called into its disk encryption API. Under btrfs this API is deprecated. The kernel noticed and made this partition read-only

Opened the sources, grep’ed the Bitcoin wallet and sent $5 out of pity.