US DoJ Dismantles Russian Botnet Infra

The United States has taken down the infrastructure of a Russian botnet that hacked millions of computers and other electronic devices around the world while acting as an authorization service.

The US Department of Justice, along with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, brought down a Russian botnet known as RSOCKS, which initially targeted Internet of Things devices, then expanded to Android and regular computing devices.

A botnet is a group of hacked Internet-connected devices controlled as a group without the owner's knowledge and often used for malicious purposes.

Instead of providing a proxy that RSOCKS has leased, the botnet provides clients with access to IP addresses assigned to devices that have been hacked. The cost of accessing the RSOCKS proxy pool ranges from $30 per day for access to 2,000 proxies to $200 per day for to access 90,000 proxies.

After purchase, customers can download a list of IP addresses and ports associated with one or more botnet backend servers. The client can then route malicious internet traffic through the compromised victim devices to obscure or mask the true source of the traffic.