I am become loadbalancer, owner of your network
In the last few years, a slew of remote code execution vulnerabilities have been found, disclosed and then promptly exploited en-masse against networking hardware known as load balancers. These devices primarily serve to distribute traffic across server farms & offload SSL processing are largely viewed as black box systems due to restrictive licensing, proprietary hardware, and a lack of transparency from the vendors into the guts of the systems. They run at the borders and cores of most cell carriers, banks, Fortune 500 companies, ISPs and some cloud providers. Since many of these devices function not only to balance traffic, but as VPN concentrators, WAFs and SSL proxies, they are generally installed in high-access parts of the network. Due to their mission criticality, they also frequently run outdated vendor code and, even worse, the Linux/BSD based operating systems they use are generally numerous versions behind current and due to the proprietary nature of their code, one does not simply 'apt get upgrade -y'. Since most run Linux/BSD as the management OS, the environment is ripe for lateral movement, persistence and further exploitation using commonly available open source tools.