American and British crime fighters have launched another round of investigations into Russian router attacks with a warning that Moscow-backed hackers are trying to subvert the world’s network devices.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on Monday issued a joint Technical Alert describing a global assault on routers, switches, firewalls, and network intrusion detection hardware by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors.

This is not quite the same thing as last month’s warning against cyber-attacks on the West’s energy utilities and other critical infrastructure, or other cyber threats attributed to Russia-sponsored hacking, referred to collectively as Grizzly Steppe. But it’s related.

“FBI has high confidence that Russian state-sponsored cyber actors are using compromised routers to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks, and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations,” the advisory says.

More about the router attacks is available at The Register