Create a botnet with 18,000 routers in one day

The author of the malware "Anarchy" has managed to create a botnet by infecting a total of 18,000 Huawei HG532 routers that were exposed to the Internet without patching the CVE-2017-17215 vulnerability.

This information is known from a conversation between this author and NewSky researcher Ankit Anubhav. In it, the author of the malware also told him that he intended to increase the botnet by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in Realtek routers.

Researchers from Rapid7 and Qihoo 360 Netlab also confirmed this threat, and detected in their probes an increase in the scanning of Huawei devices.

The author of Anarchy malware is known to have previously created other botnets from variants of the Mirai IoT botnet, known as Wicked, Omni, and Owari (Sora), which are commonly used for DDoS attacks.