Almost 2.8 million IP addresses are being used in a massive brute force password attack that aims to guess the login credentials for a variety of networking devices, including those generated by Palo Alto Networks, Ivanti, and SonicWall.
A brute force assault occurs when an attacker attempts to repeatedly log into an account or device with many usernames and passwords until the correct combination is found. Once the malicious actors access the right credentials, they can use them to access a network or take control of a device.
The Shadowserver Foundation, a threat monitoring platform, reports that a brute force attack has been going on since last month, using around 2.8 million source IP addresses every day to carry out these attacks.
Brazil accounts for the majority of them (1.1 million), with Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Morocco, and Mexico following closely behind. However, a very big range of countries of origin generally participate in the activity.
These are edge security equipment, such as firewalls, VPNs, gateways, and other security appliances, which are frequently exposed to the internet to allow remote access. The devices used in these attacks are predominantly MikroTik, Huawei, Cisco, Boa, and ZTE routers and IoTs, which are frequently hacked by big malware botnets.
The Shadowserver Foundation stated to the local media outlet that the activity has persisted for some time but has recently escalated significantly. ShadowServer also indicated that the attacking IP addresses are distributed across various networks and Autonomous Systems, suggesting the involvement of a botnet or an operation linked to residential proxy networks.
Residential proxies are IP addresses allocated to individual customers of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), rendering them highly desirable for cybercrime, data scraping, circumvention of geo-restrictions, ad verification, and ticket scalping, among other uses.
These proxies redirect internet traffic over residential networks, giving the impression that the user is a typical home user rather than a bot, data scraper, or hacker. Gateway devices targeted by this activity may be utilised as proxy exit nodes in residential proxying operations, passing malicious traffic through an organization's enterprise network. These nodes are rated "high-quality" because the organisations have a good reputation and the assaults are more challenging to identify and stop.
Changing the default admin password to a strong and distinct one, implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA), employing an allowlist of trustworthy IPs, and turning down web admin interfaces when not in use are some ways to defend edge devices against brute-forcing assaults. In the end, patching those devices with the most latest firmware and security upgrades is essential to eliminating flaws that threat actors could use to gain initial access.
