5 Powerful Botnets Found Exploiting Unpatched GPON Router Flaws
May 10, 2018
Well, that did not take long. Within just 10 days of the disclosure of two critical vulnerabilities in GPON router at least 5 botnet families have been found exploiting the flaws to build an army of million devices. Security researchers from Chinese-based cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 Netlab have spotted 5 botnet families, including Mettle, Muhstik, Mirai, Hajime, and Satori, making use of the GPON exploit in the wild. As detailed in our previous post, Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers manufacturer by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions have been found vulnerable to an authentication bypass ( CVE-2018-10561 ) and a root-RCE ( CVE-2018-10562 ) flaws that eventually allow remote attackers to take full control of the device. Shortly after the details of the vulnerabilities went public, 360 Netlab researchers warned of threat actors exploiting both the flaws to hijack and add the vulnerable routers into their botnet malware networks. Now, the researche...
