A new variant of Mirai, the botnet that nearly crippled half of Germany's internet service, has spread across the United Kingdom infecting about 2,400 home routers. Security researchers said that these infected routers are being used to carry out massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

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According to Computer Weekly, 99 percent of the affected routers belong to TalkTalk Telecom Network. Security firm Imperva Incapsula reported that 2,398 TalkTalk routers were infected by the Mirai malware.

In a statement acquired by The Register, Imperva Incapsula said, "Without full access to infected routers, it's difficult to know with certainty whether the malware used to execute this attack was the same Mirai variant used against Deutsche Telekom or the one encountered by the BadCyber researchers."

Security researchers said that the botnet attack used a new TR-064 vulnerability, which was not patched. Imperva Incapsula reported that one of their clients was at the receiving end of this massive DDoS attack.

The same vulnerability was exploited by hackers that caused internet outage to more than 900,000 Deutsche Telekom users in Germany. Following the discovery of the vulnerability, the German telecommunications company promptly released a software patch in order to prevent the spread of the malware.

In order to mitigate the spread of the malware, security experts advised customers to promptly change their router passwords. On the other hand, TalkTalk said that there is no need for users to change their router settings. The company added that while users are free to change their passwords, they assured their consumers that no personal information were leaked or hacked.

Tagsmirai, botnet, hackers, hacker, DDoS, botnets, Mirai botnet