Dutch authorities dismantle botnet of 17 million infected devices.
Dutch police and the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre disrupted a large botnet made up of at least 17 million infected devices, including computers, tablets, smartphones and IoT devices. More than 200 servers located in the Netherlands were identified as part of the backend infrastructure. Authorities said the servers were used to control infected devices for cyberattacks, spam, phishing, online fraud and website disruption. Several servers were seized for investigation, while the hosting provider took the botnet offline because it was being used for criminal purposes. The case highlights the continuing abuse of weakly secured consumer and IoT devices as “residential proxy” infrastructure for cybercrime.