Get the latest tech news

FBI and Dutch police seize and shut down botnet of hacked routers


U.S. authorities indicted three Russians and one Kazakhstan national for hacking and selling access to a botnet made of vulnerable internet-connected devices.

Then on Friday, U.S. prosecutors announced the dismantling of the botnet and the indictment of three Russians: Alexey Viktorovich Chertkov, Kirill Vladimirovich Morozov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Shishkin; and Dmitriy Rubtsov, a Kazakhstan national. Anyproxy and 5Socks, however, allegedly built their network of proxies — some of them made of residential IP addresses — by infecting thousands of vulnerable internet-connected devices and effectively turning them into a botnet used by cybercriminals, according to the Department of Justice. Ryan English, a researcher at Black Lotus Labs, told TechCrunch ahead of the domain seizures that the two services were used for several types of abuse, including password spraying, launching distributed denial-of-service () attacks, and ad fraud.

Get the Android app

Or read this on TechCrunch

Read more on:

Photo of FBI

FBI

Photo of Dutch

Dutch

Photo of botnet

botnet

Related news:

News photo

FBI: End-of-life routers hacked for cybercrime proxy networks

News photo

Police takes down six DDoS-for-hire services, arrests admins

News photo

Pro-Russia hacktivists bombard Dutch public orgs with DDoS attacks