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Magento StyleSmuggler zero-day exploited to deploy Linux backdoor

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Why This Matters

An unpatched zero-day in every version of Magento and Adobe Commerce is being actively exploited to plant a stealthy Rust backdoor on Linux servers, and Adobe has no fix timeline. With 160,000+ sites running Magento, including thousands of top-tier retailers, this puts payment-handling infrastructure at risk during a period when merchants have no patch to apply.

Key Takeaways
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A zero-day vulnerability dubbed “StyleSmuggler” affecting all versions of Magento and Adobe Commerce is being exploited in attacks to deploy a backdoor.

The first exploitation incident was recorded on September 4 on a target running the latest security updates.

E-commerce security company Sansec says that Adobe Enterprise Support confirmed earlier today that it was working on a fix but did not provide a timeline for its release.

Magento is a popular open-source e-commerce platform by Adobe installed on more than 160,000 websites, including 14,000 of the top 1 million sites.

Linux backdoor

The exploit Sansec observed in the wild abuses Magento’s template system through PHP code injection to generate a fake “failed-payment” email, which triggers code execution.

Successful exploitation installs a small Rust-based backdoor as a background process, disguised as [kworker/u:8:0]. Newer versions disguise the process as fc-cache and copy it to ~/.cache/fontconfig/fc-cache.

According to Sansec researchers, the attacker also adds a cron job configured to repeat every 30 minutes for persistence.

Although Sansec did not observe any follow-on activity, the malware can communicate with remote infrastructure and receive commands.

The researchers note that earlier samples of the backdoor used TLS/WebSockets to communicate with the command-and-control (C2) address, while newer versions disguise their traffic as Network Time Protocol (NTP).

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