The VPNFilter router malware, a giant-sized IoT botnet
revealed two weeks ago, just went from bad to somewhat worse.
Originally thought to affect 15-20 mostly home/Soho routers and NAS devices made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and QNAP,
this has now been expanded to include at least another 56 from Asus, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE.
Talos gets this information by trying to determine the models on which VPNFilter has been detected but given the size of that job (affected devices number at least 500,000, probably more) the list is unlikely to be complete.
The updated alert confirms that VPNFilter has the ability to carry out man-in-the-middle
interception of HTTP/S web traffic (something that SophosLabs own
investigation of the malware concluded was highly likely), which means that it is not only able to monitor traffic and capture credentials but potentially deliver exploits to network devices too.
Home routers have become a big target but malware able to infect so many of them is relatively rare. The last home router scare of this multi-vendor magnitude was probably DNSChanger which took years for anyone to notice, having first emerged in 2007.
As VPNFilter is more potent – there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to detect it for a start – the safest assumption is that owners of
any home router from one of the affected vendors should take immediate precautions.