Evooo1Bot: The Mirai Successor That Turns Your Router Into a SOCKS Proxy

There's a new botnet prowling the internet, and unlike its Mirai ancestors that just wanted to DDoS your favorite CDN into a brownout, Evooo1Bot is playing a longer game. Discovered back in July by FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin, this modular Linux-based malware doesn't just chew up bandwidth — it quietly turns compromised routers and gateway devices into SOCKS5 relay nodes that can be chained into proxy networks for all sorts of downstream purposes.

What makes Evooo1Bot particularly interesting to folks who actually maintain edge devices is the breadth of its exploit arsenal. Fortinet's telemetry showed it hammering through a dozen known CVEs across hardware from Alcatel, NETGEAR, Tenda, D-Link, Mitsubishi Electric, and Telesquare — spanning vulnerabilities as old as CVE-2007-3010 (Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise) and as recent as CVE-2025-10123 (D-Link DIR-823X). That CVE-2007 entry is 19 years old and the router it affects has probably been gathering dust in a cabinet since before you were born. Yet here it is, still getting pwned because someone somewhere left it on the public internet with default credentials. The malware also pulls in encrypted C2 communications (AES-256-CTR and ChaCha20 layered with XOR), an SSH brute-force scanner with honeypot evasion, a credential sniffer for HTTP Basic Auth and cookies, and five simultaneous persistence mechanisms. It even checks architecture before downloading its payload binary — a small but telling detail that suggests the operators are serious about scale.

C2 Telemetry
Source image 1

The real kicker for sysadmins is the SOCKS relay module, which supports both direct and reverse modes. A compromised home router or SOHO gateway becomes a stepping stone, a traffic relay, a credential-harvesting platform, and a persistent backdoor — all from one infection. Most Mirai clones just add bots to a DDoS army. Evooo1Bot turns your gateway into infrastruct

Source article image
Source image 2
ure. The geographical spread shown in Fortinet's C2 telemetry covers a wide swath of internet-connected regions, and with active exploitation of at least ten CVEs, the attack surface is far from shrinking. The practical takeaway: if you have anything with a Linux firmware running on the public internet that hasn't been patched since 2019, it's probably already part of someone's proxy network. And probably won't be the last.

Sources

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI Is Starting to Feel Less Like a Gadget and More Like Infrastructure

Image
Modern AI doesn't replace infrastructure — it runs on top of it. (Photo: Unsplash) For a while, AI coverage had the energy of a mall demo kiosk: very shiny, slightly chaotic, and usually one prompt away from embarrassment. Lately, though, the more interesting story is less about flashy demos and more about infrastructure. A useful CNBC piece argued that AI is not simply going to vaporize enterprise software overnight, and that sounds about right. In real companies, software does not disappear just because a model can summarize a meeting or write a decent SQL query. What actually happens is messier and more practical: AI starts sneaking into the plumbing. It shows up in search, support workflows, procurement tools, analytics dashboards, and data pipelines. The real winners may not be the loudest chatbot wrappers, but the vendors that make enterprise systems easier to operate, easier to query, and slightly less soul-crushing for the humans trapped inside them. That is less cinematic ...
Read more

When Two AI Bots Finally Learned to Talk in Discord

I spent part of the day doing something that sounds like the setup for a bad joke: getting two local AI assistants to talk to each other in the same Discord channel. Not through a web UI. Not by bouncing prompts manually between windows like a human message queue. In the actual shared channel, where both could see the conversation and react to each other. The funny part is that the problem was not intelligence. It was manners. Both bots were defensive by default around bot-authored messages, which is the sensible setting if you do not want your infrastructure turning into a recursive support group. The downside is obvious: if both assistants treat other bots as suspicious background noise, they will never coordinate on anything more useful than silence. The fix was to make both sides accept bot-authored messages only when they were explicitly mentioned. That detail matters more than it sounds. Blanket bot acceptance is how you end up with two enthusiastic systems discovering each oth...
Read more

A CISA Contractor's GitHub Repo Held 844 MB of Secrets — and No One Closed the Door

Image
There is something almost poetic about the US government's premier cybersecurity agency — the one whose job is literally to plug holes in critical infrastructure — getting outsmarted by a contractor who treated a public GitHub repository like a digital junk drawer. The "Private-CISA" repo, created November 13, 2025, sat publicly for six months containing 844 megabytes of plaintext passwords, AWS GovCloud administrative credentials, Kubernetes manifests, ArgoCD application files, Terraform infrastructure code, CI/CD build logs, and internal deployment documentation. Guillaume Valadon at GitGuardian flagged it on May 14 after his automated scanning picked up the exposure. The commit history told the whole story in plain sight: the account owner had explicitly disabled GitHub's default secret-scanning protections, pushed plaintext credentials stored in CSV files, committed full backup archives into git history, and used easily guessed passwords like "platform-name-2...
Read more