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Topic

Botnet takedowns

Coordinated law enforcement and private-sector operations to disrupt criminal botnet infrastructure, including domain seizures and node-level disruption.

Current stories

securityConfirmed8 publishers

Investigators sinkholed Sality's peer list to strand more than 15,000 infected Windows hosts

The August 31 operation cut the operator off from over 15,000 bots without cleaning a single disk. The Sality hosts on your network will stop calling home and keep infecting every executable they can write to.

Perspective Coverage

8 publishers
Builder
Builder 36%
Operator
Operator 42%
Investor
Investor 22%

Reality

Evidence72
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives68
Confidence75
securityConfirmed2 publishers

FBI disrupts the Nanjing contractor that sold QScan and QTRouter to Chinese espionage operators

QTYF built and ran the scanning and routing frameworks other Chinese teams pointed at U.S. critical infrastructure. That means the proxy addresses and scan fingerprints in your logs point to the supplier; the intruder behind them stays unnamed.

Perspective Coverage

3 publishers
Builder
Builder 23%
Operator
Operator 58%
Investor
Investor 19%

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence60
securityOne report1 publisher

US agencies assess Volt Typhoon's infrastructure access as pre-positioning for disruption

The advisory puts Volt Typhoon inside communications, energy, transport and water IT environments across the US and Guam, and says the behaviour does not look like espionage. The planning problem is outage, not data loss.

Publishers:news.risky.biz

Reality

Evidence70
Adoption58
Hype gap+12
Incentives55
Confidence62
securityOne report1 publisher

Volt Typhoon-linked JDY botnet climbed back to 1,500 devices after the KV takedown

Black Lotus Labs counted about 650 JDY bots at the January 2024 low and more than 1,500 now, all of them fingerprinting exposed services soon after CVEs go public, with US military entities the most prominent target.

Publishers:lumen.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption50
Hype gap+25
Incentives70
Confidence50
productOne report1 publisher

CrowdStrike talked a 23-year-old botnet into disconnecting itself

The company found weaknesses in Sality's peer-to-peer design and fed it false information until infected machines dropped their controller. The FBI and Justice Department handled the domain seizures.

Publishers:thenextweb.com

Reality

Evidence36
Adoption30
Hype gap+24
Incentives74
Confidence45