Explore cybersecurity trends, news and insights from the experts at Black Lotus Labs, the threat research and operations arm of Lumen.
Executive Summary The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies has expanded the known architecture of the “ngioweb” botnet, its use as a cornerstone of the notorious criminal proxy service known as NSOCKS, and appropriation by others such as VN5Socks […]
Executive Summary In mid-2023, Black Lotus Labs began an investigation into compromised routers that led to the discovery of a large, multi-tiered botnet consisting of small office/home office (SOHO) and IoT devices that we assess is likely operated by the […]
Executive Summary The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies discovered active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Versa Director servers, identified as CVE-2024-39717 and publicly announced on August 22, 2024. This vulnerability is found in Versa software-defined wide area […]
Executive Summary Revision June 7, 2024: As this story has developed, we have received feedback from a vendor/partner. While we observed a drop in activity associated with multiple router models based on scan data, we assess that ActionTec routers were […]
Executive Summary: The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies is tracking a malware platform we’ve named Cuttlefish, that targets networking equipment, specifically enterprise-grade small office/home office (SOHO) routers. This malware is modular, designed primarily to steal authentication material found […]
Executive Summary The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies has identified a multi-year campaign targeting end-of-life (EoL) small home/small office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices, associated with an updated version of “TheMoon” malware. TheMoon, which emerged in 2014, has […]
Executive Summary On December 13, 2023, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs reported our findings on the KV-botnet, a covert data transfer network used by state-sponsored actors based in China to conduct espionage and intelligence activities targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. Around the […]
Executive Summary The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies is tracking a small office/home office (SOHO) router botnet that forms a covert data transfer network for advanced threat actors. We are calling this the KV-botnet, based upon artifacts in […]
Executive Summary The Black Lotus Labs team has discovered a highly unique piece of malware designed to compromise the security of the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) functionality in the Linux kernel of container-based operating systems, like CoreOS. eBPF is […]
Executive Summary In March 2023, Lumen Black Lotus Labs reported on a complex campaign called “HiatusRAT” that infected over 100 edge networking devices globally. The campaign leveraged edge routers, or “living on the edge” access, to passively collect traffic and […]
