A Single Attack Disabled Half A Million Routers

Uploaded on 2024-06-01 in NEWS-Cybersecurity News, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms, TECHNOLOGY--Hackers

In October 2023 unknown hackers attacked a US telecommunications company and disabled hundreds of thousands of Internet routers, according to research now released by Lumen Technologies. More than 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers are estimated to have been rendered useless and taken offline, following a destructive cyber attack which disrupted user access to the Internet.

This unexplained event whch took place between October 25 and 27, 2023, and impacted a single Internet service provider (ISP) in the US, has been codenamed Pumpkin Eclipse by the Lumen's Black Lotus Labs research team.

This attack specifically affected three router models issued by the ISP: ActionTec T3200, ActionTec T3260, and Sagemcom. "The incident took place over a 72-hour period between October 25-27, rendered the infected devices permanently inoperable, and required a hardware-based replacement," says the Lumen report.

The blackout is significant, not least because it led to the abrupt removal of 49% of all modems from the impacted ISP's autonomous system number (ASN) during the time-frame.

While the name of the ISP is not disclosed, reports at the time suggested it was Windstream Communications, which suffered an outage around the same time, causing users to report a "steady red light" being displayed by the impacted modems.

Recently Lumen's analysis revealed a commodity remote access trojan (RAT) called Chalubo, a stealthy malware first detected by Sophos in October 2018, as responsible for the sabotage, with the adversary opting for it presumably in an effort to complicate attribution efforts rather than use a custom toolkit. "Chalubo has payloads designed for all major SOHO/IoT kernels, pre-built functionality to perform DDoS attacks, and can execute any Lua script sent to the bot," the company said.

The exact initial access method used to breach the routers is currently unclear, although it is suggested that it may have involved the abuse of weak credentials or exploited an exposed administrative interface.

On gaining a successful foothold, the infection chain proceeds to drop shell scripts that pave the way for a loader ultimately designed to retrieve and launch Chalubo from an external server. The destructive Lua script module fetched by the trojan is unknown.

A notable aspect of the campaign is its targeting of a single ASN, as opposed to others that have typically targeted a specific router model or common vulnerability, raising the possibility that it was deliberately targeted, although the motivations behind it are undetermined as yet. "The event was unprecedented due to the number of units affected, no attack that we can recall has required the replacement of over 600,000 devices," Lumen said.

Lumen | Reddit | Reuters | Hacker News | DSL Reports

Image: Unsplash

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