Google and an assortment of partners shut down a botnet that an approved Android device manufacturer purposefully deployed across more than 1.3 million TV set-top boxes, the company said Monday. 

Videostrong Technology Co., a China-based Android original equipment and device manufacturer, implanted a backdoor into multiple devices it sold. Those backdoors established XCPE, an expansive botnet that cybercriminals used to conduct ad fraud, steal data and route malicious traffic through residential proxy networks, according to a Google Threat Intelligence Group report.

Google took legal action to shut down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet. The company also took down command-and-control domains that more than a dozen malware families ran as modules through the XCPE backdoor, claiming it disrupted access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices from various manufacturers.

Videostrong sold Android devices with pre-installed malware for years, slipping by Google’s security tests by loading the malicious code after the device’s first boot. “The XCPE operators constantly evolved its configurations to evade Google’s pre and post-launch detections,” Charley Snyder, head of disruption operations at GTIG, told CyberScoop.

Snyder declined to say when or how Google first became aware of the approved vendor running a botnet on Android-powered devices. 

“We found this malicious software built directly into many different device models and brands over multiple years, supported by dedicated infrastructure and constantly evolving configurations to evade detection and manage their affiliates,” Google researchers wrote in the report. “We believe this campaign wasn’t an isolated rogue insider or a development oversight.”

Google banned Videostrong and any future subsidiaries from building or selling certified Android devices, and said it changed its review process to detect and stop similar activities in the future. Yet, Snyder said the company isn’t sharing specifics on these changes because it doesn’t want to provide threat actors insights that might help them circumvent these additional protections.

Most of the devices comprising the XCPE botnet were Android TV set-top boxes, but researchers also observed infected Android-based telehealth devices, karaoke machines and digital signs. 

“Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors,” researchers wrote in the report. “This led to a variety of malicious activities being conducted on and through the devices, including ad-fraud, data exfiltration, and routing malicious network traffic through the devices.”

The botnet spanned more than 170 countries, with the largest concentration of infected devices based in Malaysia, Brazil, Iraq, Mexico and Taiwan, according to TrendAI researchers. Nearly 44,000 infected devices were based in the United States between June and October.

Google also partnered with Japan’s National Police Agency, Lumen Technologies, Human Security, Plume and Synthient to study and disrupt the botnet. 

The company said the dismantling of XCPE “seriously impacted over a dozen malicious actors,” yet it warned that the underlying market for backdoors, ad fraud and residential proxy networks are resilient and operating as an interconnected supply chain.

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A company working on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security sought to cut off online access to information on more than 41,000 employees that hacktivists said they obtained from a database breached at DHS.

A search tool for the database, named Icepick, went offline for a spell before coming online again Thursday under a different registrar.

Icelandic hosting company FlokiNET said Thursday that it received a request from DHS contractor ZeroFox to remove the data, which it refused.

“By mid-morning, icepi.cx no longer resolved. Its registrar, CentralNic, had placed the domain on serverHold,” FlokiNET said in a blog post. “Our refusal kept nothing online. The request that decided the outcome to take the site down was not the one sent to us. A registrar reached the opposite conclusion the same morning, published nothing, and a global audience lost access to the site. In the meantime the site is online again under a domain from a different registrar.”

CentralNic and ZeroFox did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

DHS said late Wednesday that it was working to protect its employees against any breach.

“DHS is aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively,” a spokesperson said. “We take all security threats against our employees and officers seriously and will work to ensure all are properly protected. We will update the public when more information is available.”

The social media site Bluesky was also blocking links to the archive because it shared people’s contact information without their permission, although a company official said changes were coming because the wording had identified it as a malicious link.

FlokiNET said it refused the ZeroFox request that mislabeled the archive as part of a doxxing campaign.

“Doxxing publishes private details about private people so that others can find them at home. Icepick publishes work identities of government employees,” it wrote. “Who they work for. What their role is. How they can be reached in that role. The information describes people in the exercise of public authority, not in their private lives. Federal officers carrying out an enforcement programme are not private individuals while they are carrying it out.”

“The public has a legitimate interest in knowing who is doing that work, under whose authority, and in which office,” it continued. “Journalists cannot report on an agency whose personnel are structurally unknowable.”

ZeroFox said that regardless of that, the data made it possible to locate people whose information was in the database.

“The request does not depend on who the listed individuals are or what their duties are,” ZeroFox wrote to FlokiNET. “It rests on two facts: the data was stolen, and it is personal data that identifies and locates real people.”

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Volt Typhoon, a China-government backed hacking group that has infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure networks for years, has consistently built and dismantled ephemeral malicious infrastructure to burrow into hundreds of sensitive systems undetected, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a Wednesday report.

The covert access operation that researchers call “Silent Train” isn’t a standalone network, but rather a series of compromised small office home office (SOHO) routers, internet of things (IoT) devices and enterprise infrastructure that Volt Typhoon has rapidly rotated through since late 2023. 

The Chinese threat group has used this chain of short-lived compromised infrastructure to exploit additional vulnerabilities, including zero-days, in network edge devices and gain deeper, persistent access into victim networks, researchers said. 

“Individual chains are assembled and dismantled every day, with infrastructure continually refreshed,” Michael Horka, principal information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Volt Typhoon demonstrated a repeatable capability to rebuild a new chain with different infrastructure in less than two minutes, making the number of nodes at any one moment effectively close to zero.”

Black Lotus Labs has notified hundreds of victims since it first identified Silent Train activity, including telecom providers, government entities, defense contractors, communication services, universities and IT firms. Other victims spanning critical infrastructure include organizations in the water, energy, transportation, maritime, rail, aviation and emergency services sectors.

“The ephemeral nature of the framework means our observations should not be interpreted as a complete census of Volt Typhoon activity,” said Horka, who also was the lead researcher on the report.

The nation-state group’s investment in operational security and preserving access is remarkable, according to Black Lotus Labs.

“We observed infrastructure assembled in under two minutes, sessions averaging roughly four hours, extensive cleanup, compartmentalization and continued development of new access vectors,” Horka said. “That is considerable effort devoted not even to get into their end targets, but purely to making important operations difficult to discover and trace.”

Volt Typhoon relied more heavily on Silent Train after the FBI and Justice Department disrupted the KV Botnet in early 2024, researchers said. Earlier this year, U.S. and global authorities warned about a widespread shift in Chinese hacking groups’ use of covert networks riding on compromised common devices.

The reach of those efforts is extensive and ongoing. Volt Typhoon has exploited and abused more than 27 device classes in Silent Train operations, including edge devices, enterprise management tools, identity and access management systems, networking infrastructure and other technologies. 

“The diversity matters, but the discipline matters even more,” Horka said. “Specific device types were consistently reserved for particular positions in the chain. It operated less like a collection of randomly compromised devices and more like an organized inventory of capabilities.”

The threat group has successfully compromised devices and technologies from Fortinet, Cisco, ManageEngine, Ivanti, F5, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, TP-Link, Netgear and ArcGIS, researchers said. Black Lotus Labs also observed confirmed zero-day campaigns targeting Versa Director, N-Able N-Central, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and VeloCloud Orchestrator. 

“The exploitation patterns, victimology, and geographic targeting observed throughout our investigation point to a sustained focus on communications, defense, government, and critical infrastructure environments of enduring strategic value,” Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in the report. “Through repeated targeting of centralized management platforms and control-plane technologies, Silent Train shows how Volt Typhoon systematically pursues and preserves access to some of the most consequential networks in the United States.”

Silent Train’s ephemerality and operational discipline means it can’t be measured in size. These attributes also make it “fundamentally difficult to disrupt because there isn’t one network to take down,” Horka said. 

“What exists today will be completely different tomorrow,” he added. “You can try to remove individual pieces, but removing the actor’s ability to continuously rebuild them is a much harder problem to solve.”

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The Justice Department and FBI announced that they had seized two hacking tools connected to the Chinese government-linked group Flax Typhoon and a China-based company that the U.S. government has repeatedly taken action against, including with a new multi-agency advisory Thursday.

The domain name seizures were meant to deny hackers access to the vulnerability scanning tool Microscan and the spearphishing tool FishHub created by the Chinese firm Integrity Technology Group, which the United States sanctioned last year. The U.S. government in 2024 also made the company the focus of a takedown operation, saying it was behind a massive botnet.

Authorities were granted the court-authorized seizures in the Western District of Pennsylvania, the FBI and DOJ announced Thursday in unsealing documents in the case.

U.S. agencies paired the announcement of the seizures with an advisory from the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Security Agency.

“Chinese government-linked cyber threat actors, enabled by the Integrity Technology Group, are combining automated scanning tools, large-scale botnets, and hands-on exploitation techniques to target and steal sensitive data from organizations worldwide, including U.S. critical infrastructure sectors,” the advisory reads. “These actors exploit vulnerabilities by using scanning tools, cross-site scripting attacks, and password spraying on Microsoft Exchange servers, while establishing persistence through VPN software and exfiltrating emails and credentials using scripts.”

Similar to previous allegations, law enforcement said Integrity Tech leaned on a Mirai-variant botnet of internet-of-things devices, in this case to facilitate Microscan.

Microscan targets have included a South Carolina power company, airports in Japan and Poland, critical infrastructure companies and universities in Taiwan and others, according to the FBI and DOJ. Victims of FishHub, which downloads malware on their networks after gaining access through spearphishing, include Taiwanese universities.

“Chinese government-affiliated actors continue to position themselves within critical infrastructure networks, including operational technology (OT) systems, with the aim of disrupting critical functions at a future time of their choosing,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA. 

“Under the FBI Cyber Strategy, we pursue both the actors who threaten critical infrastructure and the enterprises that support them,” said Brett Leatherman, head of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Integrity Technology Group, a China-based company with ties to the Chinese government, is one of those enterprises, acquiring or developing cyber tools and hosting infrastructure for actors targeting networks worldwide.”

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Malware that takes technical cues from a poem to assemble a growing botnet by targeting open-source AI services has compromised more than 3,400 servers since April, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a report Wednesday. 

The poem, which a threat actor wrote and posted on a GitHub repository, seems innocuous but it’s driving a stealthy piece of malware researchers call PoeLLM. Four specific words extracted from the poem, which have been changed at least a dozen times, are converted into a command-and-control server address through a hard-coded dictionary embedded in the malware — a framework that bolsters PoeLLM’s resiliency.

“The most interesting piece of the poem approach is that the IP address used for C2 communications is invisible outside of the victim’s netflow. In other malware samples, there might be a hard-coded fallback C2 address, or URL which points to an IP address written elsewhere on the internet,” Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop.

“To anyone who comes across it, this is simply a poem on GitHub. It has no links, no files to download, no encrypted text that could easily be flagged as malicious, even by advanced models,” he added. “There would be no reason for any security researcher to identify this poem as malicious — or know about the IP address hidden within it — unless they had access to the malware referencing it.”

Researchers first encountered PoeLLM infrastructure in June during an investigation into a maximum-severity defect affecting Ivanti’s secure mobile gateway product, Sentry. That discovery uncovered a sweeping exploit-scanning and cryptocurrency-mining botnet linked to multiple compromised services and tools, including LiteLLM, Ollama, Gotenberg and Gitea.

While “PoeLLM has been extremely successful in compromising multiple AI-related services at scale,” the threat actor’s achievements beyond exploit scanning and cryptomining remain under investigation, English said. 

The malware contains functionality that can allow for remote code execution, potentially allowing a threat actor to abuse AI models on victim servers, along with public-facing services for downstream compromise, he added.

“Through the growth of this botnet, the actor has effectively created a private army of AI-enabled proxies, which will continue to multiply and provide additional vectors for attack, credential theft, token abuse and more,” English said.

The botnet has continued to grow by converting compromised servers into attackers and shifting through C2 infrastructure, leaving fewer traces across the internet.

“If one exploit server gets reported by the security community, the attacker can easily pivot and start proxying attacks through hundreds of other compromised victims,” English said. 

The poem serves as a dynamic lookup table for this infrastructure rotation. When the malware retrieves the updated poem from GitHub, it extracts four specific words based on their positions relative to fixed text anchors within the verse. Each extracted word is then matched against a hard-coded dictionary in the malware, where individual words map to sets of IP addresses. The four numbers combine to form the current C2 server address. This means the threat actor can change the entire poem, and thus the C2 location, without updating the malware itself.

“Many of the C2s used in this campaign were never detected on crowd-sourced security tools, indicating that this layer of obfuscation was very helpful in improving the resilience of a C2,” English said.

For instance, the first stanza of the poem, as it was observed last month, reads: “In the silent hum of driver, the machines begin to speak, each pulse of diode threading light through copper veins. We taught the dark to carry meaning, byte by byte — a language built from lightning, cold and clean.”

The malware extracts four specific words from the poem and matches each to a number in a hard-coded dictionary — for example, “driver” equals 92, “diode” equals 119, “decryption” equals 165, and “string” equals 74, combining to form the C2 address. When the threat actor changes the poem’s keywords, the malware automatically calculates a new C2 address without needing to update itself. This keeps the infrastructure invisible to network monitoring tools unless the malware code is directly analyzed.

Black Lotus Labs said the threat actor behind PoeLLM is likely Italian or speaks Italian. Researchers observed multiple comments in the malware code written in Italian and said the threat actor has relied on Italy-based servers for testing and C2 infrastructure. 

Researchers said they don’t know how many people are involved in the PoeLLM’s operation, and they haven’t observed any connections to other groups or campaigns.

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FortiBleed, a credential compromise campaign targeting Fortinet firewalls and VPN gateways, is an ongoing threat that can lock users out of their Fortinet accounts and also lead to ransomware attacks, the FBI and Secret Service said in an alert published Tuesday.

“Affected organizations may find themselves locked out of their systems if threat actors disable accounts or change passwords, requiring remediation steps beyond standard patching and password resets,” the alert states. “In addition, the FortiBleed attack chain has been observed as an initial entry point for ransomware affiliates.”

When it was first uncovered earlier this year, SOCRadar verified more than 86,644 compromised devices across 194 countries. Ensar Seker, chief information security officer of the company, told CyberScoop that “in our later investigation, we identified more than 400,000 or 450,000 firewalls targeted by the wider operation.”

There are different aspects of the operation that make comparisons imprecise over time, but overall the numbers “show the campaign is broader and more serious than we understood at the beginning,” Seker said.

The attackers can disable accounts or change passwords to lock users out with the access they gain, making standard password resets and patching insufficient, the government alert reads.

The alert also warns that initial access brokers are making use of the FortiBleed attack to provide access to ransomware affiliates, including INC/Lynx and Payload.

The government warning provides additional confirmation about the most worrisome elements of FortiBleed, Seker said.

“What stands out for me is that FortiBleed is still an active threat, and attackers are using stolen credentials to access the exposed Fortinet devices, create new administration accounts, and in some cases, lock the real owners out,” he said. “The FBI and the Secret Service also confirm that the success can lead to ransomware attacks as well.” 

The FBI and Secret Service recommend that Fortinet customers restrict external management or remove internet administration entirely, reset credentials, set up multifactor authentication, review firewall and VPN users for unauthorized changes, review logs for potential lateral movement, and enable secure credential storage.

The agencies are seeking any information and indicators of compromise that organizations can share, including IP addresses and any usernames the attackers use.

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Sality, a Russia-based botnet that infected more than 11 million devices during a 23-year run of operations, was dismantled Monday by law enforcement, CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation. 

CrowdStrike, which announced the takedown Tuesday alongside authorities, said it played a crucial role dismantling the botnet’s technical infrastructure, rendering the malware-spreading operation irrecoverable. 

The peer-to-peer botnet was a persistent piece of criminal infrastructure that evaded disruption for an exceptionally long period because it lacked centralized architecture. 

Sality used infected machines to communicate peer-to-peer, creating a decentralized structure that made system-wide disruption efforts more difficult than botnets that rely on a core server. 

“The same properties that made Sality resilient also created the conditions for its undoing,” CrowdStrike wrote in a blog post. The company said it targeted Sality’s peer list of infected machines and tricked the network into permanently cutting off access to those devices.

“From the operator’s perspective, infected machines simply disappear,” CrowdStrike wrote, adding that the botnet is no longer under the operator’s control.

Sality’s domains were seized by a globally coordinated effort supported by the FBI, Justice Department and authorities from Europol, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, officials said. Shadowserver is working with internet service providers to identify devices infected by Sality and aid with remediation. 

“Cybercriminals, botnets, and malware are a clear and present danger to our nation’s security and economy,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney, said in a statement. 

Europol said the Sality takedown was the culmination of work spanning global law enforcement back to 2017. 

CrowdStrike said Sality’s operator was primarily financially motivated, but it attributed three DDoS attacks to Sality, suggesting the operator was occasionally willing to use the botnet for personal or political aims. 

The botnet enabled cryptocurrency theft and cyberattacks on victims in the United States and abroad, the Justice Department said. Officials did not name the person or cybercrime group behind Sality.

“This operation demonstrates that peer-to-peer architecture, long considered a shield against disruption, is not invincible,” CrowdStrike wrote. 

“Operating for decades without consequence does not mean operating without risk,” the company added. “The calculus has changed. We will find you, we will dismantle your infrastructure, and we will impose costs that make the enterprise untenable.”

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The Trump administration rolled out a six-month test program in Texas on Monday that will draw on volunteer expertise and technology from cyber and artificial intelligence companies to protect the water sector.

“Project Watershed 250” is the first of the state-based, industry-centric pilot projects to cross the finish line that the Office of the National Cyber Director has previewed since the publication of its national cybersecurity strategy earlier this year. Water systems have long been viewed as among the most vulnerable and neediest critical infrastructure sectors, and in recent months the sector has been the victim of a spree of attacks.

“Project Watershed 250 is a commitment from the states, industry and federal government that we will continue to prioritize our nation’s safety and deliver on America-first policies for the American people,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at a rollout event in San Antonio Monday.

“U.S. companies are providing world-class cyber capabilities, red teaming that tests utilities’ current defenses, system hardening using the latest private sector cyber tools and AI tooling that helps utilities’ frontier cyber defenders to protect Texas water systems and scale proven solutions across the country,” he said. “This six-month pilot program is designed to make our water and wastewater critical infrastructure more resilient and resistant to cyber attacks by proactively finding and fixing system weaknesses.”

The pilot program, featuring collaboration between federal and state governments, stands in contrast to how the Biden administration tried to tackle the issue, with audit requirements that some GOP states challenged in court, forcing Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its rule.

“For too long, at least on the federal level, the government has admired the problem of cybersecurity in water systems,” Cairncross said. “We are going to find out what works. We’re going to target that, and we are going to scale off of this and learn lessons.”

A dozen companies — Parsons, Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services, Reflection AI, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos — appeared at the rollout Monday to praise the initiative and tout their contributions to it.

Not everyone praised the initiative elsewhere, however. One cyber professional who works on water security issues, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the program was “all smoke” and that “there’s no real money behind it.”

“The White House did what it always does — reached out to industry with their hands out asking for industry to pay for things the government should be doing, at least in part,” the person said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the program would be overseen by Cairncross’s office and Texas Cyber Command, which was established just last year. Abbott cited the need for the program by mentioning “an Iranian-backed cyberattack” on 30 water systems across 12 states and a 2024 attack on the water system in Muleshoe, Texas, suspected to be the work of Russian hackers.

“The need for cyber resilience is overwhelming,” Abbott said. “Many rural providers simply don’t have the resources they need to be able to protect themselves.”

Watershed 250 isn’t the only federal effort to bolster water cybersecurity, with lawmakers introducing legislation in the aftermath of the recent attacks. Past legislation that Congress has enacted also sought to tackle the problem.

Updated 8/31/26: with comment from cyber professional.

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The developers of a notorious botnet that’s powered mostly by hijacked Android TV boxes and other internet-connected devices have released a new version built to blend attack traffic in with ordinary web browsing and to keep its command channels from being seized by law enforcement, researchers at Palo Alto Networks said in a report published Tuesday.

The company’s Unit 42 threat intelligence group, which tracks the botnet as Kimwolf or Aisuru, said the newest version has been active since February, a month before authorities seized infrastructure powering previous versions of the botnet. 

The biggest change, according to the report, is a new flood method built on HTTP/2, the protocol that carries most web traffic today. A flood is the crude heart of a DDoS attack: thousands of infected devices send a target far more requests than it can answer. Rather than fire raw packets, this latest Kimwolf version operates with full browser fingerprints, copying the header order and behavior of the Chrome web browser. That matters because the usual defense against a flood is for tools to spot the fake traffic and drop or block it before it reaches the server. Traffic that looks like Chrome does not get dropped, so a site under attack must either serve every request and fall over, or start turning away the customers it cannot tell apart from the bots.

The second change, according to researchers, looks like it was done to withstand further takedowns. Every bot has to ask a command server for orders, which is also what authorities aim to disrupt in botnet takedowns. Normally, the command server address sits inside the malware as a web domain name, so investigators who take that name from its registrar are able to disrupt an entire botnet. 

This Kimwolf version moves its command beyond registrar controls. The malware now looks up its command address in the Ethereum Name Service, a directory that lives on the Ethereum blockchain. A web address using this service can display the way a normal domain does, but the domain’s record sits in a ledger copied across thousands of computers worldwide. The malware carries five public Ethereum services and shuffles the order before each attempt, making it harder for defensive tools to block. Additionally, there is no company to serve with a law enforcement order and no domain record to seize.

Additionally, if all five addresses fail, the botnet falls back to a fixed Tor hidden service address written into the code. Tor resolves that address through its own network rather than the ordinary domain system, and it hides where the server actually sits, which leaves investigators without a host to contact.

Researchers’ infrastructure analysis pointed to the machines powering the command structure to be located in Russia. Four of these servers shared a SSH host key, with further analysis finding that the servers sit in one network registered in Saint Petersburg.

It’s unclear if this version was made by people behind previous iterations of the botnet, or a new person or threat group looking to capitalize on the botnet’s notoriety among malicious actors. 

Unit 42 did not respond to CyberScoop’s request for comment. 

Kimwolf, which splintered off from the record-setting Aisuru DDoS botnet last year, gained the widespread attention of security researchers when it temporarily claimed the top spot in Cloudflare’s global domain rankings in late October 2025. Previous versions of the botnet were disrupted by an international law enforcement operation in March that ended with Kimwolf’s infrastructure being seized.

A Canadian man alleged to run the botnet was arrested in May and extradited to the United States.
  

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TeamPCP, the threat actor behind an unrelenting flurry of attacks on open-source software this year, has been active much longer than previously thought, according to research Oligo Security shared exclusively with CyberScoop. 

The threat actor, which gained notoriety and has captivated threat hunters as it compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages in less than four months earlier this year, was also responsible for attacks dating back to 2020, Oligo Security found. 

The security vendor’s research team found multiple attacks that bear the markings of TeamPCP, including a late 2025 campaign involving the exploitation of a ShadowRay vulnerability that resulted in the first self-propogating botnet running on hijacked AI infrastructure.

Evidence uncovered during that investigation into the ShadowRay 2.0 campaign was linked to more historical attacks originating from the same IPs, domains and other infrastructure TeamPCP used in attacks that captured widespread attention earlier this year. 

“The scariest thing in this campaign is the speed at which the payloads evolved and changed and adapted to the environment they run in. We saw changes in the speed that we’re not used to seeing in these kinds of attacks. They’re usually slow, careful,” said Uri Katz, director of research at Oligo Security. “This was clearly with the help of AI — the payloads changed rapidly to adjust and change to the environment that they were trying to attack.”

One of the domains that Oligo Security identified in July 2025 was in the profile of TeamPCP’s official GitHub account, said Avi Lumelsky, AI security researcher at Oligo Security. “It’s public, they’re not even trying to hide their identity,” he said. 

From there, Oligo linked TeamPCP to activity tracked under multiple names, including TA-NATALSTATUS and IronErn, spanning from 2020 to late 2025. Much of that activity was traced to the same IPs, domain names, a file server and command-and-control server, researchers said. 

TeamPCP emerged publicly as a brand in late 2025. Soon after, “TeamPCP started to go really broad and do campaigns, which are much more noisy,” said Gal Elbaz, co-founder and CTO at Oligo Security. 

Widespread adoption of AI and TeamPCP’s use of the technology supported this growth as the threat actor built a brand, got more active on social media and boasted publicly about its activities and claimed victims.

“The ability to control the infrastructure and orchestrate the attack with AI was also super new, and I’m sure it helps them,” Elbaz said. 

“All of the companies in the world are in this race to adopt AI because they are afraid their business will die, and they understand, of course, the opportunity. But it’s also what gives the attacker this power to go into it,” he added. “If you don’t really have visibility in what’s going on there or how it behaves, that’s exactly what attackers are after.”

TeamPCP’s more recent attacks have capitalized on new security gaps created by developers’ increasing reliance on AI and the automated systems companies use to deploy code. The threat actor is also consistently wrecking the open-source frameworks and software packages these systems rely on. 

“Most AI infrastructure is open source by design because nobody has the manpower and money to develop everything from scratch,” Lumelsky said. 

“We love open source. We use many of these products ourselves, but it’s all about reading the documentation, and I think many of these tools place the responsibility of using it right and security on the user, and developers are not used to these new kinds of animals,” he added. “That’s why the trust can be exploited at scale.”

As it uncovered a long operational history spanning multiple campaigns, Oligo Security has gained more confidence in understanding how TeamPCP operates. It also means TeamPCP was likely involved in other attacks that haven’t been attributed to it yet or attacks that haven’t been detected. 

“There’s a lot more out there that we haven’t caught or been able to prove up until now,” Elbaz said.

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Botnets powered by residential proxy networks are proliferating, enabling cybercriminals of all types to evade detection by blending in with seemingly legitimate traffic, Lumen Technology’s Black Lotus Labs said in a report Friday.

The global scale of botnets observed by Lumen is currently approaching 60 million victim IP addresses, Chris Formosa, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. Roughly 1 in 4 of those compromised IPs are based in the United States, and the true number of infected devices is much greater because there are networks beyond Lumen’s visibility and multiple devices are often unknowingly running a malicious proxy network on the same IP. 

Super-sized botnets are also gaining momentum, according to Lumen, with an average of 10 distinct botnets controlling their own populations of about 1 million active victims daily.

“The only reason these botnets keep getting more and more victims is because there is clearly a market. Aside from criminal activity, who wants access to millions of IPs regularly?” Formosa said. 

That demand for botnets fuels opportunities for growth, reselling, collaboration, and quick rebounds following massive disruptions.

IPIDEA, one of the largest residential proxy networks in operation when its infrastructure was disrupted by coordinated strikes in January, recovered at nearly half-strength within hours and earlier this surpassed its pre-disruption botnet size with a current botnet population of about 10 million IPs, researchers said.

“Their rebuild was eye-opening as they began to rebound from that interdiction,” Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Even for how quickly some botnets can rebound, theirs was surprising. We’ve seen them all rebuild, but we haven’t seen anybody do it that fast.”

Meanwhile, botnets are continuously growing, as cybercriminals seek out the cover they provide, more cheap and poorly defended devices hit the market and vendors stop providing security updates for older but still usable products. 

“Your available pool for those proxy hunters grows every year, and it will continue to grow every year,” English said, adding that more than 1 billion devices are currently vulnerable and available to be unknowingly sucked up into botnets.

The challenge for defenders is lopsided, and while disruptions and seizures occur relatively often, botnet operators have formed a global supply chain with pathways that are difficult to break. 

“We have observed multiple residential proxy services collaborating to form what amounts to the largest cooperative network ever seen on the internet,” researchers wrote in the report.

Black Lotus Labs currently tracks more than 30 distinct malicious proxy botnet clusters, and most of those regularly boast more than 100,000 daily victims.

“Our understanding of the various botnets in this space, along with experience in multiple disruptions, leads us to a very important conclusion: taking down a single malicious proxy provider or their botnet in isolation is likely to result in a short-lived solution,” researchers wrote. 

“In recent years, the malicious proxy environment has essentially created the largest collective botnet currently active on the internet, capable of moving millions of IPs within hours to wherever they are needed,” they added. “Until the malicious proxy landscape is properly addressed and regulated on both the private industry and law enforcement sides, this issue will grow and, along with the DDoS botnet landscape, will most likely become a greater problem in the long term.”

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