A massive hacking campaign has been uncovered, compromising tens of thousands of MikroTik routers to embed Coinhive scripts in websites using a known vulnerability.

So far, Censys.io has reported more than 170,000 active MikroTik devices infected with the CoinHive site-key used in this campaign (the site-key is the same across infections, indicating a single entity behind the attacks). The campaign is mainly targeting Brazil – but infections are growing internationally, according to Trustwave’s Secure Web Gateway (SWG) team, indicating much larger ambitions.

“This is a warning call and reminder to everyone who has a MikroTik device to patch as soon as possible,” Trustwave researcher Simon Kenin wrote a posting today. “This attack may currently be prevalent in Brazil, but during the final stages of writing this blog, I also noticed other geo-locations being affected as well, so I believe this attack is intended to be on a global scale.”