The FBI and European law enforcement agencies dismantled a massive network of hacked computers that had been used to defraud victims of hundreds of millions of dollars, agencies announced Tuesday.
The Justice Department seized over $8 million in cryptocurrency from the hackers and removed their malicious code from an unspecified number of infected computers in the US and around the world, according to the announcement, which said around 200,000 were infected in the US and 700,000 globally.
The tool the FBI targeted in this case, known as a botnet, is an army of infected computers that hackers often use for a variety of fraud as well as potentially disruptive hacks. It’s a cheap way to amass digital firepower that can knock critical services like schools or health care providers offline. Qakbot has been around for about 15 years, but ransomware gangs’ use of the tool in recent years added urgency to the law enforcement effort to infiltrate the group’s infrastructure.
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