Dutch authorities say they have dismantled a botnet consisting of more than 17 million devices and controlled by 200 servers as a result of a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center.
action, announced on Thursdaycame to light after a security researcher reported the spreading network to authorities. The host infrastructure was located in the Netherlands.
It is used for criminal purposes
“Police later seized several botnet servers from the hosting provider for investigation,” the NCSC said. “The botnet has been taken offline by the provider because it is being used for criminal purposes.”
according to report By NL Times on Thursday, the botnet was linked to ASOCKS, a Russian-based company that provides residential proxy services. These services serve people and organizations that want to hide their location or identity by proxying their Internet traffic through third-party devices. Proxy services are often used for illegal or unethical purposes, such as launching DDoS attacks, running botnet command and control servers, conducting phishing operations, and scraping website content.
Ars NL could not independently confirm the Times report, but the claim is being verified. Thursday’s NCSC post is about a separate post the non-profit organization published the day before. That post, in turn, has been updated to include a link to Thursday’s post. A post on Wednesday titled “Residential proxies and their key impact on digital security in the Netherlands” warned: “Residential proxies are used to protect anonymity and bypass geo-restrictions. This way, a Dutch organization can be attacked with Dutch proxies that have similarities to ‘regular’ traffic, making cybercrime more difficult.”
