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:

  • Exchange Server attacks: Run this Microsoft malware scanner now, CISA tells government agencies

    April 1, 2021

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has instructed US government agencies with on-premise Exchange systems to run Microsoft malware scanners and report results by April 5. CISA issued supplementary direction to its “ED 21-02” directive; the new request applies to any federal agency that had an Exchange server connected directly or indirectly to the internet ...

  • U.S. Special Operations Command Paid $500,000 to Secretive Location Data Firm

    March 30, 2021

    A section of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), a part of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, paid half a million dollars to a company that sells access to location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones, Motherboard has learned. Specifically, SOCOM paid Anomaly 6, a secretive contractor run by ...

  • Department of Homeland Security email accounts exposed in SolarWinds hack

    March 30, 2021

    Email accounts belonging to US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials may have been compromised during the SolarWinds attack by Russian threat actors. The Associated Press reports that unauthorized intrusions occurred during the SolarWinds supply-chain attack. SolarWinds, the central point of entry, was compromised by threat actors in December who were able to plant a malicious Orion ...

  • EU, Japan, and the US Conducted Joint Cybersecurity Training

    March 24, 2021

    Early this month, the EU, Japan, and the US recently conducted a joint cybersecurity training program as part of a series of dialogues on digital policies held last February 2021. The dialogues led to an agreement to strengthen the countries’ partnership on issues like platform regulation and industrial research. The training program was developed over the ...

  • FBI Releases the Internet Crime Complaint Center 2020 Internet Crime Report, Including COVID-19 Scam Statistics

    March 17, 2021

    The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has released its annual report. The 2020 Internet Crime Report includes information from 791,790 complaints of suspected internet crime—an increase of more than 300,000 complaints from 2019—and reported losses exceeding $4.2 billion. State-specific statistics have also been released and can be found within the 2020 Internet Crime Report and ...

  • $4,000 COVID-19 ‘Relief Checks’ Cloak Dridex Malware

    March 17, 2021

    Cybercriminals have wasted no time in hopping on the American Rescue Plan – the COVID-19 relief legislation just signed into law – as a lure for email-based scams. According to researchers at Cofense, a campaign began circulating in March that capitalized on Americans’ interest in the forthcoming $1,400 relief payments and other aid. The emails impersonate ...