'This is a control panel for the orchestration of enslaved MikroTik routers,' with the page displaying a live counter of devices connected into the botnet.īut after details of the Mēris botnet entered public domain in early September 2021, the C2 server is said to have abruptly stopped serving scripts before disappearing completely.

'When requesting the URL ru I was redirected to the domain (which is again hidden by the Cloudflare proxy),' Hron said.

Interesting enough, both the domains were linked to the same IP address: 116.202.9314, leading to the discovery of seven more domains that were actively used in attacks, one of which (tik.anygetru) was used to serve Glupteba malware samples to targeted hosts. In attack chain observed by Avast in July 2021, vulnerable MikroTik routers were targeted to retrieve the first-stage payload from a domain named bestonyclub, which was then used to fetch additional scripts from a second domain 'globalmobyxyz.' '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,' Hron said. Parts of the Mēris botnet were sinkholed in late September 2021. The botnet is known to exploit a known vulnerability in the Winbox component of MikroTik routers ( CVE-2018-14847), enabling the attackers to gain unauthenticated, remote administrative access to any affected device.

Mikrotik router update