Trend says hackers have weaponized SpringShell to install Mirai malware

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Researchers on Friday said that hackers are exploiting the recently discovered SpringShell vulnerability to successfully infect vulnerable Internet of Things devices with Mirai, an open-source piece of malware that wrangles routers and other network-connected devices into sprawling botnets.

When SpringShell (also known as Spring4Shell) came to light last Sunday, some reports compared it to Log4Shell, the critical zero-day vulnerability in the popular logging utility Log4J that affected a sizable portion of apps on the Internet. That comparison proved to be exaggerated because the configurations required for SpringShell to work were by no means common. To date, there are no real-world apps known to be vulnerable.

Researchers at Trend Micro now say that hackers have developed a weaponized exploit that successfully installs Mirai. A blog post they published didn’t identify the type of device or the CPU used in the infected devices. The post did, however, say a malware file server they found stored multiple variants of the malware for different CPU architectures.