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Active Cryptominer: Eradicate Persistence

MediumDigital Forensics & Incident Response20-30 min
The brief

A cryptominer has taken hold on this host and set up three ways to relaunch itself after a kill or reboot: a cron job, a systemd service unit, and the miner binary it runs. Killing the process is not enough — it will come back until every persistence mechanism is gone. Investigate the box (start from /root/case/brief.txt), find the three artifacts, and eradicate them. Grading reads the filesystem: the cron entry, the unit file, and the binary must all be gone.

What you'll do
  • Remove the miner's cron persistence
  • Remove the miner's systemd unit
  • Delete the miner binary

Hands-on lab: you work on a real Linux box in your browser, graded on the machine's actual state.