From malware.news
This is the story of piecing together information and research leading to the discovery of one of the largest botnet-as-a-service cybercrime operations we’ve seen in a while. This research reveals that a cryptomining malware campaign we reported in 2018, Glupteba malware, significant DDoS attacks targeting several companies in Russia, including Yandex, as well as in New Zealand, and the United States, and presumably also the TrickBot malware were all distributed by the same C2 server. I strongly believe the C2 server serves as a botnet-as-a-service controlling nearly 230,000 vulnerable MikroTik routers, and may be the Meris botnet QRator Labs described in their blog post, which helped carry out the aforementioned DDoS attacks. Default credentials, several vulnerabilities, but most importantly the CVE-2018-14847 vulnerability, which was publicized in 2018, and for which MikroTik issued a fix for, allowed the cybercriminals behind this botnet to enslave all of these routers, and to presumably rent them out as a service.