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Further inquiry into these routers showed that all were still using their default credentials. This made them very easy to take over by attackers, since both the default admin username and passwords were non-existent (blank spaces).

Additional investigation also revealed that some of the routers were also susceptible to various reflected XSS and CSRF attacks that would also allow attackers to take control of the device, even if using different login credentials.

Using Shodan, a search engine for locating Internet-connected devices, researchers found over 12,000 of Aethra routers around the world, 10,866 in Italy alone, and over 8,000 of these devices were of the model detected in the initial brute-force attack (Aethra Telecommunications PBX series). At that time, 70% of these Aethra routers were still using their default login credentials

According to a rough estimate, based on the average bandwidth associated with each router's ISPs, each infected router would be able to send out traffic between 1 and 10 Gbps during a DDoS attack.

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