It’s possible the “mystery” they refer to could be related to the identity of the hacker(s), how it got onto the routers in the first place, or the purpose for the attack
OpenWRT uses Lua for its web UI. The interpreter can be really small which works well for tiny embedded devices with mere megabytes of storage, and it's much safer than writing a web GUI entirely in C.
Oh shit, I use Windstream, this explains a lot about why they were so busy replacing everyones routers down here. I had assumed it was just a defective design since they used all the same units for every network, but it was actually malware, wild
the sad thing is this is just routers, think about all of the IoT devices that are compromised due to vendors not caring about patching security issues, just worrying about selling IoT.
Not necessarily, but the odds of getting popped by a heretofore undisclosed backdoor that your ISP didn’t think would be a big deal are eliminated entirely, and you can also do a lot more interesting things with your home infrastructure, if that’s your thing.