Evooo1Bot: The Mirai Clone That Turns Routers Into Resellable Proxy Nodes

Since July 2026, a Linux botnet called Evooo1Bot has been quietly compromising internet-facing routers and turning them into SOCKS5 proxy relay nodes — essentially renting out infected hardware as residential proxies. FortiGuard Labs detailed the malware on August 13, noting that the name comes from a hardcoded string "evooo1" found in every binary. It's built on the publicly leaked Mirai source code from 2016, but it's far more ambitious than its ancestors. Instead of just hammering websites with DDoS floods, Evooo1Bot's operator can sell or rent access to infected devices as anonymized traffic relays on the open proxy market. That's a meaningful shift: the botnet isn't just destructive, it's a revenue engine.

What makes Evooo1Bot particularly well-built is its modular design. Each infected device gets a persistent presence through five mechanisms simultaneously — systemd service, SysV init script, cron job, shell profile injection, and rc.local — with the binary lowering its OOM-killer priority and keeping /dev/watchdog open to survive reboots. It ships with a built-in SSH brute-force client containing 150+ credential pairs, a sniffer that intercepts HTTP Basic Authorization and Cookie headers, and a CVE exploit dispatcher that can sweep entire networks for vulnerable services. The initial infection vector exploits at least ten known CVEs across D-Link, NETGEAR, Tenda, Alcatel, Mitsubishi Electric, and Telesquare routers, downloading the appropriate binary variant for each device's CPU architecture. It's also got anti-analysis protection: before connecting to its C2 server on port 443, the binary checks for the presence of strace, gdb, wireshark, Ghidra, and dozens of sandbox frameworks. It skips honeypot targets by matching SSH banners against a hardcoded list of Cowrie, Kippo, and OpenCanary signatures.

C2 Telemetry
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The SOCKS5 relay module has two modes — a direct listener on port 1080 and a reverse relay that establishes an outbound encrypted connection to an operator-specified server. This separation of session c

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ontrol from proxy traffic means the botnet can run multiple proxy sessions independently while maintaining a stable control channel. For a home network operator, this is both elegant and slightly alarming: their router is silently forwarding internet traffic for some attacker's proxy business, blending in with normal HTTPS on port 443, and the only tell might be a slightly elevated network load that nobody bothers to check.

For operators with internet-facing routers — whether it's a home Netgear sitting behind a fiber modem or a Tenda AC7 running in an office lobby — the practical defense is straightforward: keep firmware updated, close unused ports, and consider monitoring outbound traffic on port 1080. The real question is how many devices are already infected and nobody noticed. Telemetry from Evooo1Bot's C2 infrastructure shows exploitation attempts spanning diverse regions, and with a loader script that downloads 12 binary variants for different architectures, the malware's reach is likely broader than current reporting suggests. The next question for the security community is whether proxy monetization will become the dominant incentive for future Mirai clones, or if this is just one variant's particular flavor.

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