MALWARE FAMILY

Kaiji

Internal ID: elf.kaiji

aliases

Last seen:Mar 17, 2026

Intelligence Profile

Surfaced in late April 2020, Intezer describes Kaiji as a DDoS malware written in Go that spreads through SSH brute force attacks. Recovered function names are an English representation of Chinese words, hinting about the origin. The name Kaiji was given by MalwareMustDie based on strings found in samples.

Threat Analysis

Kaiji is a malware family tracked by threat intelligence researchers and catalogued in the Malpedia dataset. It represents a distinct malicious software lineage with identifiable code characteristics, behaviors, and victimology.

External References

→https://blog.lumen.com/chaos-is-a-go-based-swiss-army-knife-of-malware/

→https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/xorddos-kaiji-botnet-malware-variants-target-exposed-docker-servers/

→https://intezer.com/blog/research/kaiji-new-chinese-linux-malware-turning-to-golang/

→https://www.bitdefender.com/box/blog/iot-news/kaiji-new-strain-iot-malware-seizing-control-launching-ddos-attacks/

→https://www.elastic.co/security-labs/betting-on-bots

→https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/WMDZOWK6?social_post=5483919673&linkId=131648775

→https://www.intezer.com/blog/cloud-security/top-linux-cloud-threats-of-2020/

Quick Facts

TypeMalware Family

Aliases1

Also Known As

elf.kaiji

Research Links

MITRE ATT&CK VirusTotal Google (news) Twitter/X search

Data sourced from Malpedia, Ransomware.live, RansomLook, and CTIWATCH OSINT collection. Actor attribution is based on available intelligence and may be incomplete.

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