Rocky Linux optimized for Google Cloud arrives

Rocky Linux is on a roll. A few days after Rocky Linux 9 arrived, Google Cloud recommended Rocky Linux as a replacement for CentOS 7. 

Now, CentOS 7, unlike CentOS 8, which got an abrupt end of life in December 2021, will still be supported until June 30, 2024. But that's soon enough for big companies like Facebook, Disney, GoDaddy, RackSpace, Toyota, and Verizon, which had depended on CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, to look at alternatives. And Rocky Linux is 100% compatible with RHEL.

This news comes after Google announced a Rocky Linux customer support partnership with CIQ. This company is Rocky's official support and services partner. Now Google has announced the general availability of Rocky Linux Optimized for Google Cloud. 

Google and CIQ created this collection of Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) images together. They're designed to give you optimal performance when using Rocky Linux on Compute Engine to run your CentOS workloads.

These new Rocky images contain customized variants of the Rocky Linux kernel and modules that optimize networking performance on Compute Engine infrastructure while retaining bug-for-bug compatibility with Community Rocky Linux and RHEL. In particular, Rocky is pre-configured to use the latest version of the Google virtual network interface (gVNIC). The high bandwidth networking enabled by these customizations will be beneficial to virtually any workload and are especially valuable for clustered workloads such as High-Performance Computing (HPC).

How fast are these high bandwidth VM instances? With 80 or more Virtual CPUs (vCPU), you'll get egress bandwidth speeds of 32 Gigabits per second (Gbps). With Tier 1, it jumps up to 100 Gbps. That's more than fast enough for most HPC uses.

Rocky Linux Optimized for Google Cloud can come with day-one support and GPUs. For customers building multi-cloud deployments, Google recommends the community Rocky images. Rocky Linux 8 Optimized for Google Cloud is available for all x86-based Compute Engine VM families. It will soon also be available for the new Arm-based Tau T2A. 

Going forward, Google will publish both the community and Optimized for Google Cloud editions of Rocky Linux for every major release. Both sets of images will receive the latest kernel and security updates provided. Rocky Linux 9 images will be available shortly. 

New Linux Malware Framework Lets Attackers Install Rootkit on Targeted Systems

A never-before-seen Linux malware has been dubbed a "Swiss Army Knife" for its modular architecture and its capability to install rootkits.

This previously undetected Linux threat, called Lightning Framework by Intezer, is equipped with a plethora of features, making it one of the most intricate frameworks developed for targeting Linux systems.

"The framework has both passive and active capabilities for communication with the threat actor, including opening up SSH on an infected machine, and a polymorphic malleable command and control configuration," Intezer researcher Ryan Robinson said in a new report published today.

Central to the malware is a downloader ("kbioset") and a core ("kkdmflush") module, the former of which is engineered to retrieve at least seven different plugins from a remote server that are subsequently invoked by the core component.

In addition, the downloader is also responsible for establishing the persistence of the framework's main module. "The main function of the downloader module is to fetch the other components and execute the core module," Robinson noted.

The core module, for its part, establishes contact with the command-and-control (C2) server to fetch necessary commands required to execute the plugins, while also taking care to hide its own presence in the compromised machine.

Some of the notable commands received from the server enable the malware to fingerprint the machine, run shell commands, upload files to the C2 server, write arbitrary data to file, and even update and remove itself from the infected host.

It further sets up persistence by creating an initialization script that's executed upon system boot, effectively allowing the downloader to be automatically launched.

"The Lightning Framework is an interesting malware as it is not common to see such a large framework developed for targeting Linux," Robinson pointed out.

The discovery of Lightning Framework makes it the fifth Linux malware strain to be unearthed in a short period of three months after BPFDoor, Symbiote, Syslogk, and OrBit.

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