Cisco says a giant botnet of hacked routers appears to be preparing for a cyber-attack on Ukraine. Researchers say the botnet has been created by infecting home routers with a new malware strain named VPNFilter. The malware strain is incredibly complex when compared to other IoT malware, and comes with support for boot persistence (the second IoT/router malware to do so), scanning for SCADA components, and a firmware wiper/destructive function to incapacitate affected devices. Cisco says no zero-days were used to create this botnet, but just older public vulnerabilities.
Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nation-state-group-hacked-500-000-routers-to-prepare-a-cyber-attack-on-ukraine/