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US Takes Down Massive Hacker Armies Online
20 Mar
Summary
- Four massive botnets, totaling over 3 million devices, were dismantled.
- Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets launched a 30 terabits per second attack.
- All four botnets were variants of the Mirai internet-of-things malware.
United States law enforcement agencies have successfully dismantled four significant botnets, effectively removing them from the internet. These botnets, known as JackSkid, Mossad, Aisuru, and Kimwolf, had amassed over 3 million compromised devices. The operation, led by the US Department of Justice and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, targeted the command-and-control servers used to operate these vast networks of hijacked computers.
Aisuru and its related botnet, Kimwolf, were particularly notorious, comprising over a million devices and capable of launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These botnets were often rented out to other criminals or used directly to flood websites with traffic, knocking services offline. In one instance last November, Aisuru and Kimwolf jointly executed an attack against a Cloudflare customer that surged to over 30 terabits of data per second, nearly three times the previous record.
All four botnets dismantled in this operation were identified as variants of the Mirai malware, which first appeared in 2016 and has since been the basis for numerous other internet-of-things botnets. While no arrests were immediately announced, US authorities confirmed collaboration with Canadian and German agencies targeting individuals who operated these botnets. This action underscores a commitment to protecting critical internet infrastructure from cybercriminals.
