New research by a top telecommunications company has revealed that more than 600,000 internet routers were rendered useless by an enormous cyber attack.
According to the telecommunications company’s blog post, the attack happened in November 2023 and took more than 600,000 routers offline.
Lumen’s research team discovered the attackers installed malicious software that interrupted internet access between October 25 and 27–the effects of which were experienced mostly in the Midwest.
The malware was disguised as device updates and when installed removed pertinent sections of the router’s “operational code,” rendering them useless.
“We assess with high confidence that the malicious firmware update was a deliberate act intended to cause an outage,” Lumen’s report stated.