{"id":343781,"date":"2026-06-01T00:31:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T19:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/?p=343781"},"modified":"2026-06-01T00:31:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T19:01:59","slug":"botnet-of-greater-than-17-million-devices-dismantled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/2026\/06\/01\/botnet-of-greater-than-17-million-devices-dismantled\/","title":{"rendered":"Botnet of greater than 17 million devices dismantled"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Authorities within the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised greater than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center.<\/p>\n<p>The motion, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncsc.nl\/nieuws\/gezamenlijke-actie-politie-en-ncsc-legt-groot-botnetwerk-plat\">announced Thursday<\/a>, got here about after a security researcher reported the sprawling network to authorities. The host infrastructure was positioned within the Netherlands.<\/p>\n<h2>Used for criminal purposes<\/h2>\n<p>\u201cThe police then seized several botnet servers from a hosting provider for investigation,\u201d the NCSC said. \u201cThe botnet was taken offline by the provider since it was used for criminal purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In line with a <a href=\"https:\/\/nltimes.nl\/2026\/05\/28\/ncsc-dutch-police-disrupt-global-botnet-controlled-via-netherlands-based-servers\">report<\/a> Thursday by the NL Times, the botnet was linked to ASOCKS, a Russia-based company that gives residential proxy services. These services cater to people and organizations who wish to obscure their locations or identities by proxying their Web traffic through third-party devices. Proxy services are sometimes used for illicit or unethical purposes reminiscent of performing DDoS attacks, running botnet command-and-control servers, operating phishing operations, and scraping website content.<\/p>\n<p>Ars was unable to independently confirm the NL Times report, however the claim checks out. Thursday\u2019s NCSC post linked to a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ncsc.nl\/expertblogs\/residential-proxies-en-hun-grote-impact-op-de-digitale-veiligheid-in-nederland\">separate post<\/a> that the nonprofit organization published a day earlier. That post, in turn, was updated so as to add a link to Thursday\u2019s post. Wednesday\u2019s post, headlined \u201cResidential proxies and their major impact on digital security within the Netherlands,\u201d warned: \u201cResidential proxies are used to keep up anonymity and circumvent geographical restrictions. In this manner, a Dutch organization could be attacked with Dutch proxies which have similarities with \u2018regular\u2019 traffic, making cybercrime mitigation harder.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Authorities within the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised greater than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center. The motion, announced Thursday, got here about after a security researcher reported the sprawling network to authorities. The host infrastructure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":343782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[27166,1107,38817,692],"class_list":["post-343781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-botnet","tag-devices","tag-dismantled","tag-million"],"aioseo_notices":[{"message":"The permalink for this post just changed! This could result in 404 errors for your site visitors.","status":"warning","options":{"id":"0a2ae5f84bc2c0423042ed7ec22d2e40","isDismissible":true,"actions":[{"url":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/wp-admin\/admin.php?page=aioseo-redirects","label":"Add Redirect to improve SEO","class":"aioseo-redirects-slug-changed"}]},"allowedContexts":["posts"]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343781"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343784,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343781\/revisions\/343784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ebiztoday.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}