Hacker free-for-all fights for control of home and office routers everywhere

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Cybercriminals and spies working for nation-states are surreptitiously coexisting inside the same compromised name-brand routers as they use the devices to disguise attacks motivated both by financial gain and strategic espionage, researchers said.

In some cases, the coexistence is peaceful, as financially motivated hackers provide spies with access to already compromised routers in exchange for a fee, researchers from security firm Trend Micro reported Wednesday. In other cases, hackers working in nation-state-backed advanced persistent threat groups take control of devices previously hacked by the cybercrime groups. Sometimes the devices are independently compromised multiple times by different groups. The result is a free-for-all inside routers and, to a lesser extent, VPN devices and virtual private servers provided by hosting companies.

“Cybercriminals and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors share a common interest in proxy anonymization layers and Virtual Private Network (VPN) nodes to hide traces of their presence and make detection of malicious activities more difficult,” Trend Micro researchers Feike Hacquebord and Fernando Merces wrote. “This shared interest results in malicious internet traffic blending financial and espionage motives.”