Hackers Hijacked 7,500+ MikroTik Routers and Redirecting User Traffic to Attackers

Cyber Criminals compromised around 7,500+ MikroTik Routers and maliciously enables the Socks4 proxy to redirect the legitimate user’s traffic to the malicious website controlled by attackers to perform web mining and other attacks.

At present, totally 239K IPs have confirmed to have Socks4 proxy enabled maliciously and the attacker continuously scanning the MikroTik RouterOS devices with the help of this compromised Socks4 proxy.

Previously Cybercriminals infected over 1,50,000 MikroTik Routers with Coinhive Cryptojacking Campaign using site key to ultimately mining the cryptocurrency.

MikroTik provides hardware and software for Internet connectivity around the world and they also created a RouterOS software.

With this campaign, one single malicious hacker involved in enabling the Socks4 proxy on the victim’s devices and the victim’s count keeps increasing since the attacker continuously working for it.

Earlier attacks on MikroTik routers such as CIA Vault7 hacking tool Chimay Red involves 2 exploits and also another malware has exploited the  MikroTik CVE-2018-14847 vulnerability to perform various malicious activities.

Based on the scan result, researchers identified more than 5,000K devices with open TCP/8291 port, and 1,200k of them were identified as Mikrotik devices, within which 370k (30.83%) are CVE-2018-14847 vulnerable, which means users have not updated the patch that released for CVE-2018-14847.

How Do MikroTik Routers attack Works

Once the attacker enables the Mikrotik RouterOS HTTP proxy by exploiting the vulnerability CVE-2018-14847, then the compromised devices HTTP proxy requests traffic redirect to a local HTTP 403 error page.

This error page contains a link for web mining code from coinhive where attackers perform web mining operation.

Another attack scenario represents that, an attacker enabled the Socks4 port or TCP/4153 on victims device and set the Socks4 proxy config only allows access from one single net-block 95.154.216.128/25.

The attacker using this technique in order to gain control even after users device reboot the device and all the 239K IPs only allow access from 95.154.216.128/25 but access should be from 95.154.216.167.

According to netlab,The MikroTik RouterOS device allows users to capture packets on the router and forward the captured network traffic to the specified Stream server.

At present, a total of 7.5k MikroTik RouterOS device IPs have been compromised by the attacker and their TZSP traffic is being forwarded to some collecting IP addresses.

Most of the compromised router’s traffic being redirected to 37.1.207.114 using Eavesdropping technique and attackers mainly interested in port 20, 21, 25, 110, and 143, corresponding to FTP-data, FTP, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP traffic.

Attackers mainly targeting Russia, Iran, India, Ukraine, and many more countries. So MikroTik users recommend updating the MikroTik RouterOS software system in a timely manner, and check whether the HTTP proxy, Socks4 proxy, and network traffic capture function are being maliciously exploited by attackers.

IoC

Attacker and collector IPs

37.1.207.114      AS50673 Serverius Holding B.V.
185.69.155.23     AS200000 Hosting Ukraine LTD
188.127.251.61    AS56694 Telecommunication Systems, LLC
5.9.183.69        AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH
77.222.54.45      AS44112 SpaceWeb Ltd
[removed]         103.193.137.211   AS64073 Vetta Online Ltd
24.255.37.1       AS22773 Cox Communications Inc.
45.76.88.43       AS20473 Choopa, LLC
206.255.37.1      AS53508 Cablelynx
95.154.216.167    AS20860 iomart Cloud Services Limited.