Leo brushed it off as a cache issue. Then, the CPU usage spiked to 99%. He checked the process list and saw a string of random characters— xmrig —running under the root user. He killed the process. It came back three seconds later.
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Then, it deploys a tiny Perl daemon listening on port 80 (or 443) that mimics the real license server. Any request to license.cpanel.net/verify now hits this local imposter, which always returns: Leo brushed it off as a cache issue