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Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

Schneier and Sanders link a four-part Rewiring Democracy essay series covering civic AI in Japan, Switzerland, Brazil and Scotland.

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders announced links to their Rewiring Democracy essay series on The Renovator. The four parts cover Japan's digital democracy party Team Mirai, Switzerland's public AI model Apertus, Brazil's Open Knowledge civic technologists, and civic AI in Scotland. The post is a brief index without technical details.

Schneier on Security · 15d agoAI policy

A Deep Dive Into Attempted Exploitation of CVE-2023

Mirai-like botnet scans exploit TP-Link EOL router flaw CVE-2023-33538 after CISA KEV addition, though observed exploit code is flawed.

Unit 42 observed large-scale automated scans attempting to exploit CVE-2023-33538 in end-of-life TP-Link TL-WR940N, TL-WR740N and TL-WR841N routers after CISA added the flaw to its KEV catalog in June 2025. HTTP GET requests inject commands via the ssid1 parameter at the /userRpm/WlanNetworkRpm endpoint to download and execute an arm7 ELF binary, a Mirai variant related to the Condi IoT botnet. Firmware emulation and reverse engineering showed the observed exploits are flawed and would fail, but the underlying vulnerability is real and successful exploitation requires authentication to the router's web interface. TP-Link confirmed the devices are end-of-life with no patches available and recommends replacing units and eliminating default credentials.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2023-335381

New KATARU IoT Malware Packs Linux Privilege Escalation Exploits and Mirai-Style DDoS Attacks

Nozomi Networks identified KATARU, a new Mirai-style IoT botnet delivered via Telnet brute force that uses Linux privilege-escalation exploits and encrypted C2 for DDoS floods.

Nozomi Networks identified KATARU in August after a Telnet password-guessing attack against a honeypot retrieved an ARM payload. The malware attempts exploits for CVE-2026-46300 (Fragnesia), CVE-2026-43284 (DirtyFrag), and CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail), plus a cgroup v1 release_agent escape, and persists via systemd services, cron tasks, rc scripts, OpenWrt hooks, and Android boot locations. Its C2 uses X25519 key exchange with ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption and supports TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, QUIC, and DNS floods, plus SSH brute forcing and command execution; embedded exploit shellcode in the ARM build targeted x86, suggesting untested copied code.

Home & Small Office Wireless Routers Exploited to Attack Gaming Servers

Unit 42 details an updated Gafgyt botnet variant exploiting Zyxel, Huawei, and Realtek router vulnerabilities to recruit devices for DoS attacks on gaming servers.

Unit 42 researchers identified an updated Gafgyt variant derived from the JenX botnet that combines three remote code execution exploits: CVE-2017-18368 (Zyxel P660HN-T1A), CVE-2017-17215 (Huawei HG532), and CVE-2014-8361 (Realtek RTL81XX chipset). Shodan scans show more than 32,000 wireless routers worldwide potentially vulnerable to these exploits. The exploits act as droppers, pulling architecture-specific binaries from a malicious server (185.172.110.224), and the botnet performs denial-of-service attacks against gaming servers, most notably Valve Source engine servers.