A new malware botnet was discovered targeting Realtek SDK, Huawei routers, and Hadoop YARN servers to recruit devices into DDoS (distributed denial of service) swarm with the potential for massive attacks.
The new botnet was discovered by researchers at Akamai at the start of the year, who caught it on their HTTP and SSH honeypots, seen exploiting old flaws such as CVE-2014-8361 and CVE-2017-17215.
Akamai comments that HinataBot’s operators initially distributed Mirai binaries, while HinataBot first appeared in mid-January 2023. It seems to be based on Mirai and is a Go-based variant of the notorious strain.
After capturing multiple samples from active campaigns as recently as March 2023, Akamai’s researchers deduced that the malware is under active development, featuring functional improvements and anti-analysis additions.
