March 12, 2025 By Pierluigi Paganini
The Ballista botnet is exploiting an unpatched TP-Link vulnerability, targeting over 6,000 Archer routers, Cato CTRL researchers warn.
Cato CTRL researchers observed a new botnet, called Ballista botnet, which is exploiting a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-1389 (CVSS score 8.8), in TP-Link Archer routers.
The CVE-2023-1389 flaw is an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability that resides in the locale API of the web management interface of the TP-Link Archer AX21 router. The root cause of the problem is the lack of input sanitization in the locale API that manages the router’s language settings. A remote attacker can trigger the issue to inject commands that should be executed on the device.