Router hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed that a threat actor codenamed ViciousTrap has compromised nearly 5,300 unique network edge devices across 84 countries and turned them into a honeypot-like network. The threat actor has been observed exploiting a critical security flaw impacting Cisco Small Business RV016, RV042, RV042G, RV082, RV320, and RV325 Routers (CVE-2023-20118) to corral them into a set of honeypots en masse. A majority of the infections are located in Macau, with 850 compromised devices.

A little over a dozen new security vulnerabilities have been discovered in residential and enterprise routers manufactured by DrayTek that could be exploited to take over susceptible devices. "These vulnerabilities could enable attackers to take control of a router by injecting malicious code, allowing them to persist on the device and use it as a gateway into enterprise networks," Forescout Vedere Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Of the 14 security flaws – collectively called DRAY:BREAK – two are rated critical, nine are rated high, and three are rated medium in severity. The most critical of the shortcomings is a flaw that has been awarded the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. CVE-2024-41592 concerns a buffer overflow bug in the "GetCGI()" function in the Web user interface that could lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) or remote code execution (RCE) when processing the query string parameters. Another critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-41...

The operators of the mysterious Quad7 botnet are actively evolving by compromising several brands of SOHO routers and VPN appliances by leveraging a combination of both known and unknown security flaws. Targets include devices from TP-LINK, Zyxel, Asus, Axentra, D-Link, and NETGEAR, according to a new report by French cybersecurity company Sekoia. "The Quad7 botnet operators appear to be evolving their toolset, introducing a new backdoor and exploring new protocols, with the aim of enhancing stealth and evading the tracking capabilities of their operational relay boxes (ORBs)," researchers Felix Aimé, Pierre-Antoine D., and Charles M. said .  Quad7, also called 7777, was first publicly documented by independent researcher Gi7w0rm in October 2023, highlighting the activity cluster's pattern of ensnaring TP-Link routers and Dahua digital video recorders (DVRs) into a botnet. The botnet, which gets its name from the fact it opens TCP port 7777 on compromised devices, ...

Security operations centers (SOCs) are under pressure from both sides: threats are growing more complex and frequent, while security budgets are no longer keeping pace. Today's security leaders are expected to reduce risk and deliver results without relying on larger teams or increased spending. At the same time, SOC inefficiencies are draining resources. Studies show that up to half of all alerts are false positives, with some reports citing false positive rates as high as 99 percent . This means highly trained analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down harmless activity, wasting effort, increasing fatigue, and raising the chance of missing real threats. In this environment, the business imperative is clear: maximize the impact of every analyst and every dollar by making security operations faster, smarter, and more focused. Enter the Agentic AI SOC Analyst The agentic AI SOC Analyst is a force multiplier that enables organizations to do more with the team an...

More than 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers are estimated to have been bricked and taken offline following a destructive cyber attack staged by unidentified cyber actors, disrupting users' access to the internet. The mysterious event, which took place between October 25 and 27, 2023, and impacted a single internet service provider (ISP) in the U.S., has been codenamed Pumpkin Eclipse by the Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs team. It specifically affected three router models issued by the ISP: ActionTec T3200, ActionTec T3260, and Sagemcom. "The incident took place over a 72-hour period between October 25-27, rendered the infected devices permanently inoperable, and required a hardware-based replacement," the company said in a technical report. The blackout is significant, not least because it led to the abrupt removal of 49% of all modems from the impacted ISP's autonomous system number (ASN) during the time-frame. While the name of the ISP was...

A never-before-seen botnet called  Goldoon  has been observed targeting D-Link routers with a nearly decade-old critical security flaw with the goal of using the compromised devices for further attacks. The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2015-2051  (CVSS score: 9.8), which affects D-Link DIR-645 routers and allows remote attackers to  execute arbitrary commands  by means of specially crafted HTTP requests. "If a targeted device is compromised, attackers can gain complete control, enabling them to extract system information, establish communication with a C2 server, and then use these devices to launch further attacks, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Cara Lin and Vincent Li  said . Telemetry data from the network security company points to a spike in the botnet activity around April 9, 2024. It all starts with the exploitation of CVE-2015-2051 to ret...

Technology, research, and government sectors in the Asia-Pacific region have been targeted by a threat actor called  BlackTech  as part of a recent cyber attack wave. The intrusions pave the way for an updated version of modular backdoor dubbed Waterbear as well as its enhanced successor referred to as Deuterbear. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro is tracking the threat actor under the moniker Earth Hundun, which is known to be active since at least 2007. It also goes by other names such as Circuit Panda, HUAPI, Manga Taurus, Palmerworm, Red Djinn, and Temp.Overboard. "Waterbear is known for its complexity, as it uses a number of evasion mechanisms to minimize the chance of detection and analysis," Trend Micro researchers Cyris Tseng and Pierre Lee  said  in an analysis last week. "In 2022, Earth Hundun began using the latest version of Waterbear — also known as Deuterbear — which has several changes, including anti-memory scanning and decr...

The U.S. government on Wednesday said it took steps to neutralize a botnet comprising hundreds of U.S.-based small office and home office (SOHO) routers hijacked by a China-linked state-sponsored threat actor called Volt Typhoon and blunt the impact posed by the hacking campaign. The existence of the botnet, dubbed  KV-botnet , was  first disclosed  by the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies in mid-December 2023. The law enforcement effort was  reported  by Reuters earlier this week. "The vast majority of routers that comprised the KV-botnet were Cisco and NetGear routers that were vulnerable because they had reached 'end of life' status; that is, they were no longer supported through their manufacturer's security patches or other software updates," the Department of Justice (DoJ)  said  in a press statement. Volt Typhoon  (aka DEV-0391, Bronze Silhouette, Insidious Taurus, or Vanguard Panda) is the moniker assigned to a China-based ad...

Taiwanese networking equipment manufacturer D-Link has confirmed a data breach that led to the exposure of what it said is "low-sensitivity and semi-public information." "The data was confirmed not from the cloud but likely originated from an old D-View 6 system, which reached its end of life as early as 2015," the company  said . "The data was used for registration purposes back then. So far, no evidence suggests the archaic data contained any user IDs or financial information." The development comes more than two weeks after an unauthorized party alleged to have stolen the personal data of many government officials in Taiwan as well as the source code for D-Link's D-View network management software in a post shared on BreachForums on October 1, 2023. D-Link, which roped in cybersecurity firm Trend Micro to probe the incident, cited numerous inaccuracies and exaggerations, stating that the breach led to the compromise of roughly 700 "outdate...

A severe privilege escalation issue impacting MikroTik RouterOS could be weaponized by remote malicious actors to execute arbitrary code and seize full control of vulnerable devices. Cataloged as  CVE-2023-30799  (CVSS score: 9.1), the shortcoming is expected to put approximately 500,000 and 900,000 RouterOS systems at risk of exploitation via their web and/or Winbox interfaces, respectively, VulnCheck disclosed in a Tuesday report. "CVE-2023-30799 does require authentication," security researcher Jacob Baines  said . "In fact, the vulnerability itself is a simple privilege escalation from admin to 'super-admin' which results in access to an arbitrary function. Acquiring credentials to RouterOS systems is easier than one might expect." This is because the Mikrotik RouterOS operating system does not offer any protection against password brute-force attacks and ships with a well-known default "admin" user, with its password being an empty string...

A new malware strain has been found covertly targeting small office/home office (SOHO) routers for more than two years, infiltrating over 70,000 devices and creating a botnet with 40,000 nodes spanning 20 countries. Lumen Black Lotus Labs has dubbed the malware  AVrecon , making it the third such strain to focus on SOHO routers after  ZuoRAT  and  HiatusRAT  over the past year. "This makes AVrecon one of the largest SOHO router-targeting botnets ever seen," the company  said . "The purpose of the campaign appears to be the creation of a covert network to quietly enable a range of criminal activities from password spraying to digital advertising fraud." A majority of the infections are located in the U.K. and the U.S., followed by Argentina, Nigeria, Brazil, Italy, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Russia, and South Africa, among others. AVrecon was  first highlighted  by Kaspersky senior security researcher Ye (Seth) Jin in May 2021, indicating th...

Taiwanese company ASUS on Monday  released firmware updates  to address, among other issues, nine security bugs impacting a wide range of router models. Of the nine security flaws, two are rated Critical and six are rated High in severity. One vulnerability is currently awaiting analysis. The list of impacted products are GT6, GT-AXE16000, GT-AX11000 PRO, GT-AXE11000, GT-AX6000, GT-AX11000, GS-AX5400, GS-AX3000, XT9, XT8, XT8 V2, RT-AX86U PRO, RT-AX86U, RT-AX86S, RT-AX82U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX3000, TUF-AX6000, and TUF-AX5400. Topping the list of fixes are  CVE-2018-1160  and  CVE-2022-26376 , both of which are rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS scoring system. CVE-2018-1160 concerns a nearly five-year-old out-of-bounds write bug in Netatalk versions before 3.1.12 that could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution. CVE-2022-26376 has been described as a memory corruption vulnerability in the Asuswrt firmware that co...

The Chinese nation-state actor known as  Mustang Panda  has been linked to a new set of sophisticated and targeted attacks aimed at European foreign affairs entities since January 2023. An analysis of these intrusions, per Check Point researchers Itay Cohen and Radoslaw Madej, has revealed a custom firmware implant designed explicitly for TP-Link routers. "The implant features several malicious components, including a custom backdoor named 'Horse Shell' that enables the attackers to maintain persistent access, build anonymous infrastructure, and enable lateral movement into compromised networks," the company said . "Due to its firmware-agnostic design, the implant's components can be integrated into various firmware by different vendors." The Israeli cybersecurity firm is tracking the threat group under the mythical creature name Camaro Dragon,  which  is  also known as  BASIN, Bronze President, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, and Red Lich. The ...

Several security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in cloud management platforms associated with three industrial cellular router vendors that could expose operational technology (OT) networks to external attacks. The findings were presented by Israeli industrial cybersecurity firm OTORIO at the Black Hat Asia 2023 conference last week. "Industrial cellular routers and gateways are essential IIoT devices that provide connectivity for industrial applications, facilitating remote monitoring, control, and data exchange across various industries," OTORIO said. With gateways widely deployed in critical infrastructure sectors such as substations, water utilities, oil fields, and pipelines, weaknesses in these devices could have severe consequences, impacting availability and process safety. The 11 vulnerabilities discovered by the company allow "remote code execution and full control over hundreds of thousands of devices and OT networks - in some cases, even those not...

Microsoft has confirmed that the  active exploitation of PaperCut servers  is linked to attacks that are designed to deliver Cl0p and LockBit ransomware families. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is attributing a subset of the intrusions to a financially motivated actor it tracks under the name  Lace Tempest  (formerly DEV-0950), which overlaps with other hacking groups like FIN11, TA505, and Evil Corp. "In observed attacks, Lace Tempest ran multiple PowerShell commands to deliver a TrueBot DLL, which connected to a C2 server, attempted to steal LSASS credentials, and injected the  TrueBot payload  into the conhost.exe service," Microsoft  said  in a series of tweets. The next phase of the attack entailed the deployment of Cobalt Strike Beacon implant to conduct reconnaissance, move laterally across the network using WMI, and exfiltrate files of interest via the file-sharing service MegaSync. Lace Tempest is a Cl0p ransomware affilia...

U.K. and U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have  warned  of Russian nation-state actors exploiting now-patched flaws in networking equipment from Cisco to conduct reconnaissance and deploy malware against select targets. The  intrusions , per the authorities, took place in 2021 and targeted a small number of entities in Europe, U.S. government institutions, and about 250 Ukrainian victims. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor tracked as  APT28 , which is also known as Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, and Sofacy, and is affiliated with the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). "APT28 has been known to access vulnerable routers by using default and weak SNMP community strings, and by exploiting CVE-2017-6742," the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said. CVE-2017-6742  (CVSS score: 8.8) is part of a set of remote code execution flaws that stem from a  buffer overflow conditio...

A new Golang-based botnet dubbed  HinataBot  has been observed to leverage known flaws to compromise routers and servers and use them to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The malware binaries appear to have been named by the malware author after a character from the popular anime series, Naruto, with file name structures such as 'Hinata-<OS>-<Architecture>,'" Akamai  said  in a technical report. Among the methods used to distribute the malware are the exploitation of exposed Hadoop YARN servers and security flaws in Realtek SDK devices ( CVE-2014-8361 )and Huawei HG532 routers ( CVE-2017-17215 , CVSS score: 8.8). Unpatched vulnerabilities and weak credentials have been a low-hanging fruit for attackers, representing an easy, well-documented entry point that does not require sophisticated social engineering tactics or other methods. The threat actors behind HinataBot are said to have been active since at least December 2022, with th...

A never-before-seen complex malware is targeting business-grade routers to covertly spy on victims in Latin America, Europe, and North America at least since July 2022. The elusive campaign, dubbed  Hiatus  by Lumen Black Lotus Labs, has been found to deploy two malicious binaries, a remote access trojan dubbed HiatusRAT and a  variant of tcpdump  that makes it possible to capture packet capture on the target device. "Once a targeted system is infected, HiatusRAT allows the threat actor to remotely interact with the system, and it utilizes prebuilt functionality [...] to convert the compromised machine into a covert proxy for the threat actor," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The packet-capture binary enables the actor to monitor router traffic on ports associated with email and file-transfer communications." The threat cluster primarily singles out end-of-life (EoL) DrayTek Vigor router models 2960 and 3900, with approxim...