Chinese Hackers Used Mesh of Home Routers To Disguise Attacks

An anonymous reader quotes The Record:

A Chinese cyber-espionage group known as APT31 (or Zirconium) has been seen hijacking home routers to form a proxy mesh around its server infrastructure in order to relay and disguise the origins of their attacks. In a security alert, the French National Cybersecurity Agency, also known as ANSSI (Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d'Information), published a list of 161 IP addresses that have been hijacked by APT31 in recent attacks against French organizations. French officials said that APT31's proxy botnet was used to perform both reconnaissance operations against their targets, but also to carry out the attacks themselves. The attacks started at the beginning of 2021 and are still ongoing...


The Record understands that APT31 used proxy meshes made of home routers as a way to scan the internet and then launch and disguise its attacks against Exchange email servers earlier this year; however, the technique was also used for other operations as well.

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