Last week, Microsoft issued a warning that a network of bots (or botnet) is being actively used to carry out advanced password-spraying attacks against users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The worst part? It’s been going on for over a year.
As reported by Ars Technica, hackers working for the Chinese government used a botnet — consisting mainly of TP-Link routers, with over 16,000 compromised devices, from around the world — to carry out attacks that hijacked Microsoft Azure accounts.
Password spraying is a type of brute-force attack in which numerous login attempts are made from multiple IP addresses, making it difficult to detect the attacks because each individual device only attempts to log in a few times. With thousands of botnet devices at hand, you can see how effective this method could potentially be.
The Chinese botnet was first discovered in October 2023 by a researcher who named it Botnet-7777. Microsoft officially refers to …