Hacker creates botnet which compromises 18,000 Huawei routers in 24 hours

A hacker claims to have created a botnet within 24 hours that has compromised 18,000 routers of Chinese telecom giant Huawei.[caption id="attachment_4789501" align="alignnone" width="1280"] Representational image. Reuters.[/caption]The cyberattacker, who goes by the pseudonym Anarchy, boasted of building the botnet by using an old vulnerability, ZDNet.com reported on Friday. According to a report in Bleeping Computer, this new botnet was first spotted this week by security researchers from a cybersecurity company called NewSky Security.Following the news, other security firms including Rapid7 and Qihoo 360 Netlab confirmed the existence of the new threat as they saw a huge recent uptick in Huawei device scanning.The botnet author reached out to NewSky security researcher Ankit Anubhav who believes that Anarchy may actually be a well-known threat actor who previously identified as Wicked.What surprised security researchers was that Anarchy built the gigantic botnet within a day using a vulnerability which had been used before—CVE-2017-17215.Botnets, which refer to a vast networks full of enslaved devices, can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), send malicious packets of data to a device and remotely execute code.