MikroTik (officially SIA "Mikrotīkls") is a

Latvia Latvia ( or ; lv, Latvija ; ltg, Latveja; liv, Leţmō), officially the Republic of Latvia ( lv, Latvijas Republika, links=no, ltg, Latvejas Republika, links=no, liv, Leţmō Vabāmō, links=no), is a country in the Baltic region of ...

n network equipment manufacturer. The company develops and sells wired and wireless network routers,

network switch A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device. A ...

es, access points, as well as

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s and auxiliary software. The company was founded in 1996, and as of August 2019, the company website reported an estimated 280 employees. In 2021, with a value of EUR 1.24B, Mikrotik was the 3rd largest company in Latvia and the first private company to surpass EUR 1B value in Latvia. MikroTIK_hAP_Lite_and_RouterBOARD_750

History

MikroTik was founded in 1996 by John Tully and Arnis Riekstiņš in Riga, Latvia, developing networking software for x86 PC hardware that would develop into a product called RouterOS. The earliest versions of RouterOS were based on Linux 2.2. In 2002, MikroTik began producing their own networking-focused low-power single-board computers, branded RouterBoard, that ran RouterOS. These early SBCs could be expanded and/or used as components of other systems, but as time passed, this RouterBoard/RouterOS platform would develop into a full line network equipment.

Timeline

* 1997 - Release of software for x86 PC platform, called simply MikroTik Router Software, that would eventually develop into RouterOS. * 2002 - Release of RouterBoard series PCI add-in boards to be used with MikroTik x86-based PCs running RouterOS. * 2003 - Release of RouterBoard 200, a single-board router platform, and RouterBOARD 220 with the SBC integrated into an enclosure with a 2.4 GHz wireless antenna powered by PoE. Original RouterBoard was based on the Geode CPU, but later used MIPS. * 2012 - Release of Cloud Core Router (CCR) 1000-series, using Tilera's TILE-Gx many-core CPUs. Tilera-base CCRs would eventually be released with up to 72-cores at 1GHz. * 2022 - Release of CCR 2000-series using ARM64-architecture CPUs and featuring 100GbE capability in the CCR2216. Also, a return to PC add-in boards with the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe.

Product vulnerabilities

* On 23 May 2018, Cisco Talos Intelligence Group reported that some MikroTik devices were found vulnerable to the VPNFilter malware. * RouterOS through 6.42 allows unauthenticated remote attackers to read arbitrary files and remote authenticated attackers to write arbitrary files due to a directory traversal vulnerability in the WinBox interface.

Meris

Beginning in June 2021, a botnet composed of unprotected Mikrotik devices created huge volumes of application-layer traffic using HTTP pipelining, resulting in

DDOS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conn ...

. The net was named Mēris (or Meris) by Qrator. Yandex reported attacks beginning August 4, 2021 (over 5 million requests per second) with a massive attack on 5 September 2021 reaching almost 22 million RPS (requests per second). Cloudflare acknowledged an attack at over 17 million RPS in July 2021.

References

External links

Company website
{{Authority control Companies of Latvia Telecommunications equipment vendors