The routers of the MikroTik brand are vulnerable and someone has managed to access thousands of them to mine cryptocurrency without their owners knowing
A sophisticated attack on hundreds of thousands of routers from the MikroTik brand has turned them into zombies that are used to mine cryptocurrency like Ethereum or Monero.
The attack is designed to find connected devices on the Internet with a vulnerability that allows them to access their memory. Once found, you can create an automated attack that accesses the router, installs a program and lets it run permanently.
Routers are devices used in all households with a fixed internet connection, in companies and data centers around the world. The bad news is that they are unsafe devices and that they do not usually update, work that usually falls to the operators.
According to the Hard Fork media, most infected routers are in Brazil, but there are many teams in other countries, including Spain, according to the map that has been made public.
In August, about 200,000 of these computers were found infected. It is estimated that this malware epidemic now affects between 350,000 and 400,000 routers equipment.
The web application steals the user's energy and bandwidth
These routers have a small operating system that, among other things, runs a web server. Hackers can access to install CoinHive, a web application that mines these crypto currencies using the owner's bandwidth and energy without their consent.
Unfortunately this type of attacks on routers is nothing new and it is quite common to find unprotected computers. The infamous hacker team Lizard Squad jumped to all media in 2016 to create a huge network of infected routers and use them to attack the systems of Microsoft Xbox Live and Sony PlayStation.
On that occasion Lizard Squad managed to infect between 150,000 and 200,000 routers, enough to create a zombie network capable of carrying out a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
In this case, hackers prefer to use them to make money by mining Monero, but nothing prevents them from converting them into an attack network to other sites.
The good news is that MikroTik launched an urgent update on October 9 for its routers, mostly installed in companies, and the manufacturer requests that all users update the equipment as soon as possible.
Date update on 2018-12-06. Date published on 2018-12-06. Category: hackers Author: Oscar olg Fuente: economiadigital.