In a development that will surprise absolutely no one who has tried to access their email over hotel Wi-Fi in Yakutsk, the FBI announced Thursday that it has dismantled a Russian government-operated botnet that was powered, naturally, by the cybersecurity equivalent of duct tape and forgotten firmware updates.
The botnet, according to U.S. officials, was allegedly controlled by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, which, when not busy dabbling in foreign elections or international cyber skulduggery, apparently moonlights as a collector of ancient routers. The FBI said the network was made up largely of small office and home office routers, which tend to be neglected with all the love and care society usually reserves for fax machines and dial-up modems.
Court documents indicated that the FBI obtained legal authorization to remotely access and remove the malware from infected devices. This was presumably done in a manner that involved no actual knocking on doors, although one imagines a few elderly routers were rather startled by the sudden federal attention. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California said the operation disrupted a years-long hacking campaign they claim was also used for spying on American and foreign targets alike.
The FBI’s announcement specified that the operation targeted routers made by Ubiquiti and MicroTik, companies that many IT professionals remember with a mix of nostalgic fondness and bitter despair. Users of affected devices are advised to install the latest updates, assuming they still remember where the router is and that it did not become a paperweight sometime during the Obama administration.
In case you were wondering whether Russia responded with a touching confession and an apology bouquet, a Kremlin spokesman said none of this was their fault and that the GRU was shocked — shocked — to learn routers had even been involved.
Yes, it turns out the hackers did not need a nuclear-powered AI network to spy on you, they just needed your Uncle Phil to ignore that router firmware update from 2014.