Pre-auth RCE on MikroTik: exploited before the patch, rebuilt in three hours

In short #

• MikroTrick chains two RouterOS bugs into a full, unauthenticated takeover of any MikroTik device with SSH reachable. Exploitation ran from September 2, one day before the patches and three days before the advisory .
• We reproduced the entire chain end to end from only the public advisory and the patch diff, in a single uninterrupted run: approximately three hours and roughly 110,000 tokens (the token count covers the main session; the subagent that reverse-engineered the patched binaries in the background ran on top of that), verified against both vulnerable releases. Four frontier models given the same inputs failed.
• These devices no longer sit only at the edge. They wire up local AI clusters (the DGX Spark, TP>2 crowd), so one compromise exposes model weights, datasets, and all east-west traffic.
• Defense still investigates at ticket speed while offense iterates at agent speed , and CERT Polska cannot rule out additional undisclosed bugs. The detection section and IoC table below are the checks to run now.

On September 5, CERT Polska disclosed six vulnerabilities in MikroTik RouterOS. Two of them chain into MikroTrick: a full, unauthenticated takeover of any router with SSH reachable. Attackers had been using it since at least September 2, a day before MikroTik shipped fixes and pushed a notification to every phone running its app, begging people to update.