Botnet of Thousands of MikroTik Routers Abused in Glupteba, TrickBot Campaigns
Mar 23, 2022
Vulnerable routers from MikroTik have been misused to form what cybersecurity researchers have called one of the largest botnet-as-a-service cybercrime operations seen in recent years. According to a new piece of research published by Avast, a cryptocurrency mining campaign leveraging the new-disrupted Glupteba botnet as well as the infamous TrickBot malware were all distributed using the same command-and-control (C2) server. "The C2 server serves as a botnet-as-a-service controlling nearly 230,000 vulnerable MikroTik routers," Avast's senior malware researcher, Martin Hron, said in a write-up, potentially linking it to what's now called the Mēris botnet. The botnet is known to exploit a known vulnerability in the Winbox component of MikroTik routers ( CVE-2018-14847 ), enabling the attackers to gain unauthenticated, remote administrative access to any affected device. Parts of the Mēris botnet were sinkholed in late September 2021 . "The CVE-2018-