Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies, including those from the U.S. and other nations, have issued a joint advisory concerning the security of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter users in the wake of the dismantling of the MooBot botnet, operated by the Russia-linked threat actor APT28. MooBot was utilized to conduct covert cyber operations, including credential harvesting and hosting of malicious tools, targeting various sectors across multiple countries. APT28’s exploitation of compromised EdgeRouters for credential theft, network traffic proxying, and hosting phishing pages underscores the seriousness of the threat posed by such compromised devices.
The botnet’s operations extend back to 2022, with APT28 targeting a wide array of industries, including aerospace, defense, education, energy, government, hospitality, manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, technology, and transportation, across several countries. The attacks primarily exploit routers with default or weak credentials to deploy OpenSSH trojans, enabling APT28 to execute various malicious activities, including credential collection and network traffic manipulation. The severity of the threat is exacerbated by the exploitation of CVE-2023-23397, a critical privilege escalation vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook, further enabling APT28 to conduct relay attacks without user interaction.
APT28’s arsenal includes MASEPIE, a Python backdoor used for executing arbitrary commands on victim machines via compromised Ubiquiti EdgeRouters acting as command-and-control infrastructure. To mitigate the risks posed by compromised routers, organizations are advised to perform hardware factory resets, update firmware, change default credentials, and implement firewall rules to restrict remote management services exposure. These measures are crucial in light of the increasing trend of nation-state actors leveraging routers as a launchpad for attacks, as evidenced by the creation of botnets like MooBot and others, highlighting the importance of proactive security measures in defending against sophisticated cyber threats.
