Security researchers discovered a new variant of Mirai malware known as Miori that is targeting internet of things (IoT) devices to integrate into a larger botnet and launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Trend Micro noted that the threat, which was first identified in early December, takes advantage of an exploit in the ThinkPHP programming framework. The remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability allows threat actors to infect machines based on the Linux operating system and execute Miori, which then generates a notification on the victim’s console.
Once attackers verify that a system has been infected through their command-and-control (C&C) server, they utilize the Telnet protocol and take advantage of weak or commonly used passwords to conduct brute-force attacks on other IP addresses. In a screenshot, researchers looking into Miori revealed some of the passwords that were used during recent attack campaigns, which included admin123, support, root and even default.
