C0055: Quad7 Activity
Quad7 Activity, also known as CovertNetwork-1658 or the 7777 Botnet, is a network of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers. [1] [2] The botnet was initially composed primarily of TP-Link routers and was named Quad7 due to compromised devices exposing TCP port 7777 with the distinctive banner xlogin. Later activity showed a significant increase in compromised Asus routers and the addition of new ports and banners, including TCP port 63256 displaying alogin. Quad7 infrastructure functions as a collection of egress IPs that various China-affiliated threat actors have used to conduct password-spraying and brute-force operations. [1][3] Microsoft has reported that Storm-0940 leveraged credentials obtained through Quad7 Activity to target organizations in North America and Europe, including government agencies, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, law firms, energy firms, IT providers, and defense industrial base entities. [2]
Security context for executives and security teams
C0055: Quad7 Activity describes Quad7 Activity, also known as CovertNetwork-1658 or the 7777 Botnet, is a network of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers. (Citation: Bitsight 7777 Botnet) (Citation: Microsoft Storm-0940) The botnet was initially composed primarily of TP-Link routers and was named Quad7 due to compromised devices exposing TCP port 7777 with the distinctive banner xlogin . Later activity showed a significant increase in compromised Asus routers and the addition of new ports and banners, including TCP port 63256 displ...
Executive priority
C0055: Quad7 Activity is an official MITRE ATT&CK campaign. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.
Technical view
Security teams should validate C0055: Quad7 Activity by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (the platforms named in the official object), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.
Likely telemetry
- Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
Detection direction
- Validate whether C0055: Quad7 Activity appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
- Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
- Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.
Mitigation priorities
- Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
- Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
- Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits
Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.
This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Quad7 Activity
Quad7 Activity, also known as CovertNetwork-1658 or the 7777 Botnet, is a network of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers. [1] [2] The botnet was initially composed primarily of TP-Link routers and was named Quad7 due to compromised devices exposing TCP port 7777 with the distinctive banner xlogin. Later activity showed a significant increase in compromised Asus routers and the addition of new ports and banners, including TCP port 63256 displaying alogin. Quad7 infrastructure functions as a collection of egress IPs that various China-affiliated threat actors have used to conduct password-spraying and brute-force operations. [1][3] Microsoft has reported that Storm-0940 leveraged credentials obtained through Quad7 Activity to target organizations in North America and Europe, including government agencies, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, law firms, energy firms, IT providers, and defense industrial base entities. [2]
How security teams should use this page
Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.
Techniques used
This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.
| Domain | ID | Name | Relationship / procedure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | T1685 | Disable or Modify Tools | Quad7 Activity has disabled the TP-Link management interface for TP-Link by killing the |
| Enterprise | T1665 | Hide Infrastructure | Quad7 Activity has rotated the compromised SOHO IPs used in password spraying activity to hamper detection and network blocking activities by defenders.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1584.008 | Network DevicesSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has compromised network devices, such as IP cameras, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, and SOHO routers, to leverage for follow-on activity.[2]CitationSekoia 7777 Botnet JUL 2024 |
| Enterprise | T1071.002 | File Transfer ProtocolsSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has used a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server to download malicious binaries.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1071.001 | Web ProtocolsSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has used the same User Agents of |
| Enterprise | T1589.002 | Email AddressesSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has gathered targeted individual’s e-mail addresses for the password spraying attempts.[3] |
| Enterprise | T1190 | Exploit Public-Facing Application | Quad7 Activity has enabled the exploitation of vulnerabilities for remote code execution capabilities in SOHO routers including CVE-2023-50224 and CVE-2025-9377 in TP-Link devices.[2][4] |
| Enterprise | T1090.002 | External ProxySub-technique | Quad7 Activity has initialized SOCKS5 proxies on compromised devices.[2][1] |
| Enterprise | T1110.003 | Password SprayingSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has conducted a throttled variant of password spraying techniques that only utilized a single attempt to sign in within a 24-hour time period, eluding brute force detection thresholds.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1090.003 | Multi-hop ProxySub-technique | Quad7 Activity has routed traffic through chains of compromised network devices for password spray attacks.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1571 | Non-Standard Port | Quad7 Activity has used non-standard TCP ports – such as 7777, 11288, 63256, 63210, 3256, and 3556 for C2.[2]CitationSekoia 7777 Botnet JUL 2024 |
| Enterprise | T1105 | Ingress Tool Transfer | Quad7 Activity has downloaded additional binaries from a remote File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server to compromised devices.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1027.011 | Fileless StorageSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has infected victim network devices by storing artifacts in the |
| Enterprise | T1059.004 | Unix ShellSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has enabled the creation of an access-controlled command shell |
| Enterprise | T1584.005 | BotnetSub-technique | Quad7 Activity has compromised various branded SOHO routers to form a botnet that has been leveraged in password spraying activity.[1][2] |
Groups, software, and campaigns
S0095: ftp
All related ATT&CK context
Object version and sync metadata
The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates.
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.2 | 1.0 | Current bundle | 53f799b8d628… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.0 | Older bundle | 869c67a01400… |
Mirrored ATT&CK source object
The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.
External references and citations
MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.
- [1]Bitsight 7777 Botnet
Batista, João. Gi7w0rm. (2024, August 27). Retrieved June 5, 2025.
Open source URL - [2]Microsoft Storm-0940
Microsoft Threat Intelligence. (2024, October 31). Chinese threat actor Storm-0940 uses credentials from password spray attacks from a covert network. Retrieved June 4, 2025.
Open source URL - [3]Medium 777-Botnet
Gi7w0rm. (2023, October 19). The curious case of the 7777-Botnet. Retrieved June 5, 2025.
Open source URL - [4]TP-Link Quad 7 AUG 2025
TP-Link . (2025, August 29). Technical News and Reports about Quad 7 (7777) Botnet aka CovertNetwork-1658. Retrieved October 10, 2025.
Open source URL - [5]mitre-attackC0055Open source URL
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