Industrial routers are being hit by zero-days from new Mirai botnets

• Chinese researchers discovered a variant of Mirai with an offensive name
• It targets industrial routers and smart home devices with zero-day flaws, misconfigurations, and poor passwords
• Some 15,000 active IP addresses were found

A new malicious botnet was recently observed, spreading through zero-day vulnerabilities and assimilating industrial routers and smart home devices.

Cybersecurity researchers from the Chinese outfit Qi’anxin XLab claim the botnet is based on Mirai, an infamous piece of malware that’s known to be behind some of the biggest and most devastating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

However, the new versions differ greatly from the original Mirai, as they abuse more than 20 vulnerabilities, and target weak Telnet passwords, as means of distribution and spreading. Some of the vulnerabilities have never been seen before, and don’t have CVEs assigned just yet. Among them are bugs in Neterbit routers, and Vimar ...