Dutch authorities dismantle botnet of more than 17 million devices

Authorities in the Netherlands dismantled a botnet of more than 17 million devices, managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center. The action, announced Thursday, followed a security researchers report of the sprawling network.

The host infrastructure was located in the Netherlands. The NCSC said, "The police then seized several botnet servers from a hosting provider for investigation." "The botnet was taken offline by the provider because it was used for criminal purposes." The NL Times linked the botnet to ASOCKS, a Russia-based company that provides residential proxy services.

These services cater to people and organizations who want to obscure their locations or identities by proxying their Internet traffic through third-party devices. Proxy services are often used for illicit or unethical purposes such as performing DDoS attacks, running botnet command-and-control servers, operating phishing operations, and scraping website content.

Netherlands

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