Researchers on Tuesday unveiled a major discovery—malicious firmware that can wrangle a wide range of residential and small office routers into a network that stealthily relays traffic to command-and-control servers maintained by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.
A firmware implant, revealed in a write-up from Check Point Research, contains a full-featured backdoor that allows attackers to establish communications and file transfers with infected devices, remotely issue commands, and upload, download, and delete files. The implant came in the form of firmware images for TP-Link routers. The well-written C++ code, however, took pains to implement its functionality in a “firmware-agnostic” manner, meaning it would be trivial to modify it to run on other router models.
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