FBI takes down major botnet but accidentally frees 95,000 devices

Hackers took over the very same hacked devices the FBI had just cleaned ￰0￱ was supposed to be a federal win turned into a feeding frenzy, where criminals moved fast to grab nearly 95,000 devices the agency had unintentionally ￰1￱ happened right after the FBI took down a botnet responsible for some of the worst cyberattacks ever ￰2￱ to The Wall Street Journal , that takedown opened the ￰3￱ devices, which were previously part of an illegal botnet, got hijacked again almost instantly. A rival botnet crew called Aisuru jumped on the ￰4￱ grabbed more than a quarter of the freed machines and started launching high-speed attacks that, according to Damian Menscher, a Google security engineer, are already breaking records.

“It became a race to take them over as fast as possible,” Damian ￰5￱ floods the internet with world-record DDoS attacks On September 1, Cloudflare reported it had recorded the biggest DDoS attack ever ￰6￱ attack pushed out 11.5 trillion bits per second of garbage traffic. That’s enough to kill the download speed of over 50,000 home internet connections in one ￰7￱ posted about it on X, calling it a “world record” in ￰8￱ operators say this was just one of many similar attacks in recent ￰9￱ attacks were short but massive—some only lasted seconds, likely just tests of the botnet’s full ￰10￱ real danger is what these botnets are made ￰11￱ doesn’t use computers—it uses routers, smart TVs, and security ￰12￱ people forget, leave online, and rarely ￰13￱ they’re hijacked, they become part of the ￰14￱ once they’re part of a botnet, they’re locked in, only one botnet at a ￰15￱ the FBI removed the old malware, that opened the door for Aisuru to swoop ￰16￱ comes right after prosecutors in August charged a 22-year-old man from Oregon for running a botnet that knocked X offline earlier this ￰17￱ attack showed how vulnerable even big platforms are to these kinds of ￰18￱ what’s coming next looks a lot ￰19￱ botnets move from fraud to cyberwar These aren’t just tech nuisances ￰20￱ new generation of botnets is being built using faster devices with stronger bandwidth, giving them far more ￰21￱ experts say these networks can now be used to knock out internet access across entire ￰22￱ Labovitz, head of tech at Nokia’s Deepfield division, put it simply: “Before the concern was websites; now the concern is countries.” It’s already ￰23￱ UK said Russia’s GRU launched DDoS attacks on Ukraine’s banks in 2022, just before its military invasion.

Now, criminal networks seem to be following that same playbook, but on a global ￰24￱ network that Google killed earlier this year had grown from 74,000 Android TV devices in 2023 to over 10 million in just two ￰25￱ made it the biggest known botnet made of smart ￰26￱ said it was used to click billions of ads in a massive fraud scheme, but warned it could just as easily be turned into a weapon, either for ransomware or internet takedowns. Meanwhile, another botnet called ResHydra is growing even ￰27￱ from tens of millions of devices, ResHydra started with basic fraud but has now begun launching online ￰28￱ Formosa, a researcher at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, said that controlling a network of that size would let someone “do extreme damage to a country.” Until now, only big cloud services like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services have been able to block most of these ￰29￱ even those defenses could fall if botnets like Aisuru or ResHydra get stronger or combine ￰30￱ your project in front of crypto’s top minds?

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