Mysterious Malware Threatens Millions of Routers and IoT Devices

According to a report released by cybersecurity researchers at AT&T Alien Labs (USA), BotenaGo malware can use several methods to attack targets and then create a “backdoor” on compromised devices. They can target millions of routers and IoT devices.

Mysterious Malware Threatens Millions of Routers and IoT Devices

Some antivirus software detects the new malware as a variant of the Mirai botnet virus, a type of botnet virus that caused the majority of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2016. Although the way the original data is distributed looks similar, it is written in the Go programming language.

The Go programming language has become popular among software developers in recent years, and it is also increasingly popular with malware authors.

The BotenaGo malware works by scanning the internet for vulnerable targets and analyzing them for security vulnerabilities.

Attackers can exploit security vulnerabilities in internet connected devices and can execute commands remotely and that is something that attackers can use as a gateway to penetrate into the wider network, if they are not properly secured.

Attackers could also potentially use this option to spread malicious viruses, but at the time researchers were analyzing BotenaGo, they appeared to have been deleted from the attacker-hosted server, so they could not be analyzed.

BotenaGo has the potential to compromise millions of devices with the security vulnerability detailed by the researchers, but currently lacks any explicit communication with a control server.

According to researchers, there are three possibilities given for this malware.

First, BotenaGo is just one module of a larger malware suite that is not currently being used in attacks.

Second, BotenaGo is likely linked to Mirai, which is used by those behind Mirai when targeting specific computers.

Ultimately, the researchers suggest that BotenaGo is still in development and its beta was accidentally released early hence why it has not yet been successful.

Even if it doesn't work, the number of vulnerabilities BotenaGo could exploit would result in millions of devices potentially being attacked.

Security experts also note that to reduce the impact of IoT malware threats, companies need to install security updates as soon as possible and IoT devices should not be widely exposed to the internet and should have appropriate firewall configurations installed to protect them.

According to Vietnamnet