Court-Authorized Operation Disrupts Worldwide Botnet Used by People’s Republic of China State-Sponsored Hackers


The Justice Department today announced a court-authorized law enforcement operation that disrupted a botnet consisting of more than 200,000 consumer devices in the United States and worldwide. As described in court documents unsealed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, the botnet devices were infected by People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored hackers working for Integrity Technology Group, a company based in Beijing, and known to the private sector as “Flax Typhoon.”

The botnet malware infected numerous types of consumer devices, including small-office/home-office (SOHO) routers, internet protocol (IP) cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs), and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. The malware connected these thousands of infected devices into a botnet, controlled by Integrity Technology Group, which was used to conduct malicious cyber activity disguised as routine internet traffic from the infected consumer devices.

Read more…
Source: U.S. Justice Department


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • IRS data leak exposes personal info of 120,000 taxpayers

    September 3, 2022

    The Internal Revenue Service has accidentally leaked confidential information for approximately 120,000 taxpayers who filed a form 990-T as part of their tax returns. IRS Form 990T is used to report ‘unrelated business income’ paid to a tax-exempt entity, such as nonprofits (charities) or IRA and SEP retirement accounts. This income is commonly derived from sales unrelated ...

  • US telcos admit to storing, handing over location data

    September 2, 2022

    US mobile carriers know a lot about where their customers every move, and according to letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), they routinely store such location data for years, willingly hand it over to law enforcement if served a proper subpoena, and say users can’t opt out. FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a ...

  • US govt sues Kochava for selling sensitive geolocation data

    August 29, 2022

    The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Idaho-based location data broker Kochava for selling sensitive and precise geolocation data (in meters) collected from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. As the consumer protection watchdog said, Kochava’s clients could use this data to identify and keep track of mobile users’ ...

  • Nelnet Servicing breach exposes data of 2.5M student loan accounts

    August 29, 2022

    Data for over 2.5 million individuals with student loans from Oklahoma Student Loan Authority (OSLA) and EdFinancial was exposed after hackers breached the systems of technology services provider Nelnet Servicing. Technology services from Nelnet Servicing, including a web portal, are used by OSLA and EdFinancial to give online access students taking out a loan access to ...

  • US ‘actively defending against foreign interference and influence’ in midterms, Cyber Command says

    August 25, 2022

    US military and intelligence officials are stepping up their efforts to defend the electoral process from foreign hacking and disinformation as the November midterms approach, officials said Thursday. Officials are “actively defending against foreign interference and influence operations in U.S. elections,” US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency said in a statement, “specifically by focusing ...

  • Twitter, Meta kill hundreds of pro-Western troll accounts

    August 25, 2022

    Well known for an abundance of anti-western troll accounts and propaganda, Twitter and Meta are reporting that they’ve taken down nearly 200 accounts that, for the past five years, have been amplifying pro-Western messages in the Middle East and Central Asia. Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and Graphika, a social media analytics company, have published a report ...