Security News > 2021 > March > New Mirai Variant and ZHtrap Botnet Malware Emerge in the Wild

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new wave of ongoing attacks exploiting multiple vulnerabilities to deploy new Mirai variants on internet connected devices.

Regardless of the flaws used to achieve successful exploitation, the attack chain involves the use of wget utility to download a shell script from the malware infrastructure that's then used to fetch Mirai binaries, a notorious malware that turns networked IoT devices running Linux into remotely controlled bots that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks.

In a related development, researchers from Chinese security firm Netlab 360 discovered a new Mirai-based botnet called ZHtrap that makes use of a honeypot to harvest additional victims, while borrowing some features from a DDoS botnet known as Matryosh.

"Zhtrap sets up a honeypot on the infected device, [and] takes snapshots for the victim devices, and disables the running of new commands based on the snapshot, thus achieving exclusivity over the device."

Last March, researchers discovered a Mirai variant called "Mukashi," which was found targeting Zyxel network-attached storage devices to conscript them into a botnet.

Then in October 2020, Avira's IoT research team identified another variant of the Mirai botnet named "Katana," which exploited remote code execution vulnerabilities to infect D-Link DSL-7740C routers, DOCSIS 3.1 wireless gateway devices, and Dell PowerConnect 6224 Switches.

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