Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a cyber attack campaign recently that was existing in the wild from the past six years. And reports are in that the plan was to infect millions of devices in China with Pink Botnet Malware and to prepare them in such a way that they can be used to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or to send spam content.
Qihoo 360, a Chinese internet security company, was the firm behind the discovery of the above stated attack and its Netlab security team has confirmed that the hackers behind the campaign infected over 1.6 million devices so far.
Pink Malware basically infects MIPS loaded routers and takes control of the device and projects it as a botnet. That can be later used by the threat actors to send spam, launch Ddos attacks disrupting corporate networks in the west.
NSFocus, a Beijing based security company confirmed the existence of Zombie nodes loaded Pink Botnet malware in its latest independent report and stated that the cyber criminals behind the incident could have taken the advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities in network gateway devices to infect the devices to form a super large-scale bot network.
What is a botnet?
A botnet is a network of malware infected computing devices either controlled by single or multiple parties through a centralized server controlled by a hacker/s. They are usually used to send spam, launch denial of service attacks, siphon data and allow an attacker to conduct ad frauds.
