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 netw ...

es, access points, as well as

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

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 A geode (; ) is a geological secondary formation within sedimentary and volcanic rocks. Geodes are hollow, vaguely spherical rocks, in which masses of mineral matter (which may include crystals) are secluded. The crystals are formed by the fill ...

CPU, but later used MIPS. * 2012 - Release of Cloud Core Router (CCR) 1000-series, using

Tilera Tilera Corporation was a fabless semiconductor company focusing on manycore embedded processor design. The company shipped multiple processors, including the TILE64, TILE''Pro''64, and the TILE''Pro''36, TILE-Gx72, TILE-Gx36, TILE-Gx16 and TILE-G ...

TILE-Gx TILE-Gx is a VLIW ISA multicore processor family by Tilera. It consists of a mesh network of up to 100 cores. It is to be produced by TSMC with 40 nm. It was announced on February 19, 2013 that Tilera would produce a 72-core Tile-Gx CPU cap ...

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 AArch64 or ARM64 is the 64-bit extension of the ARM architecture family. It was first introduced with the Armv8-A architecture. Arm releases a new extension every year. ARMv8.x and ARMv9.x extensions and features Announced in October 2011, AR ...

-architecture CPUs and featuring

100GbE 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) are groups of computer networking technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at rates of 40 and 100 gigabits per second (Gbit/s), respectively. These technologies offer significantly ...

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 VPNFilter is malware designed to infect routers and certain network attached storage devices. As of 24 May 2018, it is estimated to have infected approximately 500,000 routers worldwide, though the number of at-risk devices is larger. It can steal ...

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 A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...

composed of unprotected Mikrotik devices created huge volumes of application-layer traffic using

HTTP pipelining HTTP pipelining is a feature of HTTP/1.1 which allows multiple HTTP requests to be sent over a single TCP connection without waiting for the corresponding responses. HTTP/1.1 requires servers to respond to pipelined requests correctly, with non-p ...

, 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 A ...

. The net was named Mēris (or Meris) by Qrator.

Yandex Yandex LLC (russian: link=no, Яндекс, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian multinational technology company providing Internet-related products and services, including an Internet search engine, information services, e-commerce, transportation, maps ...

reported attacks beginning August 4, 2021 (over 5 million

requests per second A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates ...

) 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