Comment Infection Method - Well it's not... (Score 5, Informative) 172
If you dig into the articles to some of the raw analysis you'll discover two things.
1) "It remains an open question regarding how the attackers have gained the root privileges to install the rootkit. However, considering the code quality, a custom privilege escalation exploit seems very unlikely." So it unlikely that they gained root with something new, but it was a web site that was hacked, so the likely vector is something related to what the site it was running. PHP, WordPress, DB Injection, and Apache exploits.
2) "Based on the Tools, Techniques, and Procedures employed and some background information we cannot publicly disclose, a Russia-based attacker is likely."