>Attackers have generated $3,900 so far in an ongoing campaign that's exploiting the popular rTorrent application to install currency-mining software on computers running Unix-like operating systems, researchers said Thursday.
It's unavoidable on UNIX-like operating systems. If they weren't running rTorrent, there would be something else to exploit, like finger.
Subject: What you once thought was a brain-dead misimplementation is now the protocol definition!
or, Unix Historical Revisionism At Work Again,
or, IETF-approved RFC1196
This whole thing is pretty sad, or pathetic, or depressing
or something.
Firstly, there's the rewriting of a protocol to conform
to a ubiquitous misimplementation -- the unix story over and
over.
Then there's the growing Balkanisation (or
Multics-ification) of the net -- I remember laughing out
loud when I found that MIT-MULTICS refused finger service on
security grounds.
Then, or course, there's the pathetic implementational
warnings about how one should be very very careful in
implementing this sensitive and dangerous protocol -- as if
this perilous protocol somehow innately offered a direct way
to shove fingers up unix' sockets. Or something.