The mysterious Quad7 botnet has evolved its tactics to compromise several brands of Wi-Fi routers and VPN appliances. It’s armed with new backdoors, multiple vulnerabilities, some of which were previously unknown, and new staging servers and clusters, according to a report by Sekoia, a cybersecurity firm.
The two members of Congress called on the Commerce Department to investigate risks related to TP-Link routers amid concerns over state-backed Chinese hacking operations.
Sekoia.io investigated the mysterious 7777 botnet (aka. Quad7 botnet), published by the independent researcher Gi7w0rm inside the “The curious case of the 7777 botnet” blogpost.
This investigation allowed us to intercept network communications and malware deployed on a TP-Link router compromised by the Quad7 botnet in France.
To our understanding, the Quad7 botnet operators leverage compromised TP-Link routers to relay password spraying attacks against Microsoft 365 accounts without any specific targeting.
Therefore, we link the Quad7 botnet activity to possible long term business email compromise (BEC) cybercriminal activity rather than an APT threat actor.
However, certain mysteries remain regarding the exploits used to compromise the routers, the geographical distribution of the botnet and the attribution of this activity cluster to a specific threat actor.
The insecure architecture of this botnet led us to think that it can be hijacked by other threat actors to install their own implants on the compromised TP-Link routers by using the Quad7 botnet accesses.
FortiGuard Labs unmasks IZ1H9 and explores the aggressive exploits in the Mirai-Based DDoS Campaign
FortiGuard Labs encountered recent samples of a DDoS-as-a-service botnet calling itself Condi. It attempted to spread by exploiting TP-Link Archer AX21 (AX1800) routers vulnerable to CVE-2023-1389, which was disclosed in mid-March of this year. Read more.
Researchers began to detect exploit attempts in the wild targeting the patched, high-severity flaw in TP-Link routers starting on April 11.
