North Korean 'ted' Linux Backdoor Found Inside Trojanised HAProxy at South Korean Firms

Rapid7 Labs disclosed a previously undocumented Linux toolkit compiled directly into trojanised HAProxy 2.8.12 load balancers at two South Korean organisations in the automotive and media sectors. The 'ted' implant and companion 'curlRAT' were delivered by replacing legitimate binaries, including crond, sshd, agetty, atd and polkitd, rather than through vulnerability exploitation, allowing web traffic interception, encrypted SSH credential harvesting and log sanitisation. Rapid7 attributed the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, drawing on APT37 domain infrastructure, Lazarus delivery-model similarities and a Kimsuky-consistent initial access hypothesis involving a compromised groupware vendor.