August 9, 2021

Tenable discovered a vulnerability on April 26 that is actively exploited by threat actors and is tracked as CVE-2021-20090.

The vulnerability affects home routers running Arcadyan firmware, which in turn paves the way for attackers to use malicious payloads from the Mirai botnet.

The vulnerable devices include dozens of router models from multiple providers and ISPs, including Asus, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, O2 (Telefonica), Verizon, Vodafone, Telstra and Telus.

The vulnerability found in the web interfaces of routers with Arcadyan firmware provides unauthenticated remote attackers with access to authentication bypass. Millions of routers are reportedly vulnerable to attack depending on how many router models and vendors are already affected by the bug.

The latest attacks were discovered by researchers from Juniper Threat Labs.

While Juniper Threat Labs “identified some attack patterns that attempt to exploit this vulnerability in the wild coming from an IP address located in Wuhan, Hubei province, China,” the report showed that threat actors actively exploiting the vulnerability could do so with malicious tools similar to those used in a Mirai campaign against IoT and network security using a Mirai botnet variant.

For more information, read the original story in Bleeping Computer.