A new variant of the InterPlanetary Storm malware has infected roughly 13,500 machines across 84 different countries and counting, says email security firm Barracuda Networks in their September Threat Spotlight research. The malware, named InterPlanetary Storm, was initially uncovered in May 2019 as a malicious attack designed to target Windows machines.
This new variant, which Barracuda researchers first detected in late August, is now also targeting IoT devices, such as TVs that run on Android operating systems, and Linux-based machines, such as routers with ill-configured SSH service. Essentially, this new variant gains access to machines by running a dictionary attack against SSH server, similar to FritzFrog, another peer-to-peer (p2p) malware.
