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A new malware botnet was discovered targeting Realtek SDK, Huawei routers, and Hadoop YARN servers that is capable of launching attacks with data volumes reaching several Tbps.
The new botnet was discovered by researchers at Akamai, who caught it on their HTTP and SSH honeypots, seen exploiting old flaws such as CVE-2014-8361 and CVE-2017-17215.
Akamai stated 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.
The malware is distributed by brute-forcing SSH endpoints or using infection scripts and RCE payloads for known vulnerabilities.
After infecting devices, the malware will quietly run, waiting for commands to execute from the command and control server.
Older versions of HinataBot supported HTTP, UDP, ICMP, and TCP floods, but the newer variants only feature the first two. However, even with only two attack modes, the botnet can potentially perform very powerful distributed denial of service attacks.
The HTTP packet size ranges between 484 and 589 bytes. The UDP packets generated by HinataBot are particularly large (65,549 bytes) and consist of null bytes capable of overwhelming the target with a large traffic volume.
Akamai benchmarked the botnet in 10-second attacks for both HTTP and UDP, and in the HTTP attack, the malware generated 20,430 requests for a total size of 3.4 MB. The UDP flood generated 6,733 packages totaling 421 MB of data.
The researchers estimated that with 1,000 nodes, the UDP flood could generate roughly 336 Gbps, while at 10,000 nodes, the attack data volume would reach 3.3 Tbps.
In the case of the HTTP flood, 1,000 devices would generate 2,000,000 requests per second, while 10,000 nodes would take that number of 20,400,000 rps and 27 Gbps.
HinataBot is still in development and might implement more exploits and widen its targeting scope anytime.
Image Credit : Bleeping Computers
