US Takes Down Botnets Used in Record-Breaking Cyberattacks

The Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid, and Mossad botnets had infected more than 3 million devices in total, many inside home networks, according to the US Justice Department.

The collection of millions of hacked computers known as Aisuru and Kimwolf have been used to launch some of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. Now United States law enforcement agencies have wiped both of them off the internet along with two of the other hordes of hijacked computers—known as botnets—in a single broad takedown.

On Thursday, the US Department of Justice, working with the cybercrime-fighting agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, announced that it had dismantled four massive botnets in a single operation, removing the command-and-control servers used to commandeer the hacker-run armies of compromised devices known by the names JackSkid, Mossad, Aisuru, and Kimwolf. Together, operators of the four botnets ...