Researchers Uncover 'Pink' Botnet Malware That Infected Over 1.6 Million Devices

guest · Nov 1, 2021

Researchers Uncover 'Pink' Botnet Malware That Infected Over 1.6 Million Devices
November 1, 2021
https://thehackernews.com/2021/11/researchers-uncover-pink-botnet-malware.html

Cybersecurity researchers disclosed details of what they say is the "largest botnet" observed in the wild in the last six years, infecting over 1.6 million devices primarily located in China, with the goal of launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and inserting advertisements into HTTP websites visited by unsuspecting users.

Qihoo 360's Netlab security team dubbed the botnet "Pink" based on a sample obtained on November 21, 2019, owing to a large number of function names starting with "pink."
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Mainly targeting MIPS-based fiber routers, the botnet leverages a combination of third-party services such as GitHub, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, and central command-and-control (C2) servers for its bots to controller communications, not to mention completely encrypting the transmission channels to prevent the victimized devices from being taken over.

Interestingly, Pink has also been found adopting DNS-Over-HTTPS (DoH), a protocol used for performing remote Domain Name System resolution via the HTTPS protocol, [...]
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More than 96% of the zombie nodes part of the "super-large-scale bot network" were located in China, Beijing-based cybersecurity company NSFOCUS noted in an independent report, with the threat actor breaking into the devices to install malicious programs by taking advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities in the network gateway devices.
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Qihoo 360 Netlab: Pink, a botnet that competed with the vendor to control the massive infected devices

Most of the following article was completed around early 2020, at that time the vendor was trying different ways to recover the massive amount of infected devices, we shared our findings with the vendor, as well as to CNCERT, and decided to not publish the blog while the vendor's working was in progress. Last week, CNCERT finally disclosed this botnet, and we have learned that the infected devices have “mostly” been taken care of, so here we are..
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Researchers Uncover 'Pink' Botnet Malware That Infected Over 1.6 Million Devices

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