13,000 MikroTik Routers Hijacked by Botnet for Malspam and Cyberattacks

I have a mikrotik at home and generally believe it to be a very solid product. A take aways from this hack:

1. mikrotik doesn't bill themselves as "consumer grade". It's a huge learning curve to get started with them. There are graphical tools but it's not much different then Cisco or juniper. You can put in bad or faulty configurations and the router will happily do the bad or faulty things you told it to.
2. It only effects routers that are severely misconfigured routers. You need specific services turned on, and have dns grossly misconfigured. Depending on your use case at home it is doubtful a hone user would do this. Also
3. the man thing I don't like about my device is that the software isn't open source. The hardware is quite well known tho and there are ports of *wrt and opensense that run on it , plus you probably could just run a Linux distro on it if you wanted. The bootloader isn't locked down. It's an arm64 computer with a lot of network ports.

That being said I really like the router itself. Performance is great, price is amazing. It does anything and everything I ask it to.