New Aeternum C2 Botnet Evades Takedowns via Polygon Blockchain

For a long time, stopping a network of hijacked computers, known as a botnet, used to be fairly straightforward. Police would find the main control server sending out the orders and shut it down or sinkhole the traffic to a safe place. However, a discovery by Qrator Research Lab shows that cybercriminals have found a way to bypass this off switch entirely.

Their research identifies a new botnet called Aeternum C2, which doesn’t rely on a central server that can be seized. Instead, the people running it publish their instructions to the Polygon blockchain. For your information, a Blockchain is a digital ledger spread across thousands of computers worldwide. Because the data is copied everywhere at once, there is no single target for authorities to hit.

How the System Controls Infected PCs

Qrator’s research reveals that Aeternum is a loader written in C++, and it works on almost ...