Might be related to the recent US-CERT advisory...

National Cyber Awareness System:



TA18-086A: Brute Force Attacks Conducted by Cyber Actors
03/27/2018 06:00 PM EDT


Original release date: March 27, 2018

Systems Affected
Networked systems

From: Tom Hayward
Sent: ‎3/‎24/‎2018 5:29 PM
To: Puget Sound Data Ring
Subject: [HamWAN PSDR] OPP outage and vulnerability warning

This morning I discovered a bunch of failed login attempts to HamWAN routers coming from other HamWAN routers. When checking the list of logged in users, there weren't any. Apparently something was able to remotely execute code on HamWAN routers without logging in. I think it may be related to this: https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=119255. Nigel and I worked to identify the traffic and patch the hole. We were able to stop it through a combination of firewall rules, disabling services, and upgrading software.

One casualty is that upgrading the software on Seattle-ER1 broke the OPP IPsec configuration. We haven't figured out how to fix this, so OPP is down for now.

To protect your equipment from this exploit, you can disable unnecessary services like this:

/ip service disable telnet,ftp,www,api,winbox,api-ssl

Make sure to do this from SSH so that you know it's working before disabling Winbox!

This is a reminder of the importance of strict firewall rules. Nigel is a wise man.

Tom