Description

Security researchers identified AVrecon, a new Linux-based remote access trojan that compromises and enslaves small office/home office (SOHO) routers in its campaigns and then rents them to other threat actors to do malicious activity. According to Lumen Black Lotus Labs findings, the AVRecon malware has so far infected over 41,000 nodes in 20 countries around the world and is capable of executing extra commands as well as stealing victim bandwidth while making it available to unauthorised parties as a proxy service. These Residential proxy services were developed to conceal criminal activity such as password spraying, web proxying, and advertising fraud. Furthermore, based on recent studies by KrebsOnSecurity and Spur.us, AVrecon is the malware engine behind SocksEscort, a 12-year-old service that rents hacked small office/home office (SOHO) devices or routers to cybercriminals seeking to hide their real location online, and they arrived at this conclusion due to correlations between SocksEscort and AVRecon's command-and-control (C2) servers. Additionally, following the publication of the AVRecon report, the AVRecon threat actors are null-routing their compromised infrastructure and attempting to keep control over the botnet in order to continue monetizing it and enrolling customers in the SocksEscort 'proxy as a service'. Moreover, routers and other edge equipment have become profitable attack vectors for threat actors in recent years since their firmware is rarely patched against vulnerabilities, may not support endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, and is designed to only manage bigger bandwidths.