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Outlaw, also known as Dota, Shellbot, and Outlaw Hacking Group, is a long-running Linux-focused intrusion and cryptojacking actor first publicly identified in 2018. The group is associated with a Perl-based shellbot and a broader toolset used to compromise Linux servers, network appliances, and IoT devices, primarily for Monero mining and botnet operations. Reporting has linked the operation to Romanian-language artifacts and operator handles such as hezb and bashirc, but high-confidence public attribution does not establish state sponsorship; the activity is best characterized as financially motivated cybercrime. Outlaw commonly gains initial access by brute forcing weak or default SSH credentials and has also been observed exploiting Linux privilege-escalation vulnerabilities including Dirty COW and CVE-2017-16995, as well as targeting exposed services and web shells. The actor has conducted large-scale scanning and target-list generation to support broad opportunistic compromise. Persistence is frequently established by replacing or inserting SSH authorized keys, using cron-based relaunch mechanisms, and deploying backdoors that survive reboots. The group’s post-compromise tradecraft includes deployment of an IRC-based backdoor disguised as legitimate processes, execution of shell scripts and obfuscated Perl payloads, process masquerading, removal of competing miners, host profiling, and use of modified XMRig miners for CPU-based Monero mining. Documented bot capabilities include remote command execution, distributed denial-of-service functions, port scanning, file transfer, and upload features. Outlaw has also used tooling to evade detection, including process spoofing and randomized scanning behavior, and has leveraged compromised hosts as command-and-control relays and high-availability infrastructure. Victimology indicates broad opportunistic targeting of internet-exposed Linux systems, with observed compromises spanning servers, firewalls, VPN gateways, smart devices, and other network-connected equipment. Public telemetry has shown substantial victim concentration in the United States, with additional activity in Germany, Italy, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada, Brazil, and South Korea. Some reporting also associates the group with targeting organizations in finance and automotive environments, though its overall pattern remains mass exploitation for illicit monetization rather than narrowly tailored espionage.
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Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
35 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
10 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
5 additional families tracked in Mallory.
3 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 3 of them exploited in the wild.
The next exploits found on the system were based on Pokemon and Dirty Cow with a customized variant of shellcode (The Pokemon exploit is also based on the Dirty Cow vulnerability.). Dirty Cow is a vulnerability that affects all Linux-based operating systems and even Android.
This time, the group explored unpatched systems vulnerable to CVE-2016-8655 ... as attack vectors.
The Ubuntu privilege exploit was found in the file, Non, which is another privilege escalation tool related to the exploit for CVE-2017-16995.
43 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
9 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Referenced as a rival cryptomining family/operator whose known artifacts are included in the lambsys kill list.
A long-running botnet campaign conducting opportunistic SSH compromise activity worldwide. In the observed activity, infected nodes attempted to replace .ssh directories, add the same attacker-controlled SSH public key with the comment 'mdrfckr' into authorized_keys, and establish persistent backdoor access on newly compromised hosts.
Linux-focused cryptomining botnet activity that compromises systems via weak or default SSH credentials, installs persistence through SSH authorized keys and cron, deploys an IRC-based backdoor, and runs a modified XMRig miner for Monero mining.
Long-running SSH botnet/crypto-botnet activity using the stable 'mdrfckr' authorized_keys persistence artifact, brute-force SSH logins with a fixed credential dictionary, account hijacking via chpasswd, reconnaissance, and competitor-cleanup commands. The April 2026 observation shows the same campaign updating its SSH client tooling to libssh 0.11.1 while retaining the same persistence key and playbook.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.