Google, Partners Smack the Shit Out of the 1.3 Million-Device XCPE Botnet

Right, here’s the cheerful little disaster: Google teamed up with assorted security wonks and infrastructure wranglers to disrupt the XCPE botnet, which had managed to infect about 1.3 million devices. That’s 1.3 million boxes, routers, and bits of internet-connected crap being quietly bossed around by criminals because apparently patching systems is still considered optional by far too many useless bastards.

The botnet was built by exploiting known vulnerabilities in end-of-life and poorly maintained small office/home office gear. You know, the same junk people plug in, forget exists, and then act surprised when it starts helping cybercriminals proxy malicious traffic, hide their activity, and generally make the internet even more of a sewage pipe than usual.

According to the report, the infected devices were being used as residential proxies. In plain English: the bad guys were routing their traffic through hacked devices to make it look legitimate. That meant fraud, abuse, anonymity for other attacks, and a nice layer of “wasn’t me” for every scumbag involved. Bloody brilliant, if you’re a criminal parasite.

Google and its partners moved to cut off command-and-control infrastructure and otherwise kneecap the operation. This sort of disruption matters because these botnets thrive on scale, shitty device hygiene, and the endless supply of unpatched hardware scattered across the globe like electronic cockroaches. Kill enough infrastructure, and the whole rotten mess starts to wobble.

The bigger lesson, which people will no doubt ignore until the next flaming catastrophe, is that old internet-connected devices are a security nightmare. If vendors stop supporting them and users never update or replace them, criminals will happily recruit them into their bot armies. Then everyone acts shocked when their webcam, router, or mystery box from 2017 is suddenly part of an international fraud machine. What a fucking surprise.

So yes, this was a solid takedown, and credit where it’s due: disrupting a botnet this size is no small feat. But let’s not pretend the war is won. There’s always another heap of abandoned hardware, another gang of opportunistic bastards, and another executive somewhere insisting security budgets are “too high” right up until the incident report lands on their desk like a dead rat.

Read the original article: https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint-security/google-13-million-device-strong-xcpe-botnet

Anecdote time: years ago, I found a forgotten branch office router still running ancient firmware because nobody “wanted to risk downtime.” Noble sentiment. It was already half-dead, spewing nonsense into the logs, and being probed from six countries before lunch. I replaced the damn thing, and suddenly everyone praised the “miraculous stability improvement.” Miraculous, my arse. That’s what happens when you stop letting decrepit shitbox hardware participate in organized crime.

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