The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet’s attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.

Since its debut more than a year ago, the Aisuru botnet has steadily outcompeted virtually all other IoT-based botnets in the wild, with recent attacks siphoning Internet bandwidth from an estimated 300,000 compromised hosts worldwide.

The hacked systems that get subsumed into the botnet are mostly consumer-grade routers, security cameras, digital video recorders and other devices operating with insecure and outdated firmware, and/or factory-default settings. Aisuru’s owners are continuously scanning the Internet for these vulnerable devices and enslaving them for use in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can overwhelm targeted servers with crippling amounts of junk traffic.

As Aisuru’s size has mushroomed, so has its punch. In May 2025, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a near-record 6.35 terabits per second (Tbps) attack from Aisuru, which was then the largest assault that Google’s DDoS protection service Project Shield had ever mitigated. Days later, Aisuru shattered that record with a data blast in excess of 11 Tbps.

By late September, Aisuru was publicly flexing DDoS capabilities topping 22 Tbps. Then on October 6, its operators heaved a whopping 29.6 terabits of junk data packets each second at a targeted host. Hardly anyone noticed because it appears to have been a brief test or demonstration of Aisuru’s capabilities: The traffic flood lasted less only a few seconds and was pointed at an Internet server that was specifically designed to measure large-scale DDoS attacks.

Aisuru’s overlords aren’t just showing off. Their botnet is being blamed for a series of increasingly massive and disruptive attacks. Although recent assaults from Aisuru have targeted mostly ISPs that serve online gaming communities like Minecraft, those digital sieges often result in widespread collateral Internet disruption.

For the past several weeks, ISPs hosting some of the Internet’s top gaming destinations have been hit with a relentless volley of gargantuan attacks that experts say are well beyond the DDoS mitigation capabilities of most organizations connected to the Internet today.

Steven Ferguson is principal security engineer at Global Secure Layer (GSL), an ISP in Brisbane, Australia. GSL hosts TCPShield, which offers free or low-cost DDoS protection to more than 50,000 Minecraft servers worldwide. Ferguson told KrebsOnSecurity that on October 8, TCPShield was walloped with a blitz from Aisuru that flooded its network with more than 15 terabits of junk data per second.

Ferguson said that after the attack subsided, TCPShield was told by its upstream provider OVH that they were no longer welcome as a customer.

“This was causing serious congestion on their Miami external ports for several weeks, shown publicly via their weather map,” he said, explaining that TCPShield is now solely protected by GSL.

Traces from the recent spate of crippling Aisuru attacks on gaming servers can be still seen at the website blockgametracker.gg, which indexes the uptime and downtime of the top Minecraft hosts. In the following example from a series of data deluges on the evening of September 28, we can see an Aisuru botnet campaign briefly knocked TCPShield offline.

Paging through the same uptime graphs for other network operators listed shows almost all of them suffered brief but repeated outages around the same time. Here is the same uptime tracking for Minecraft servers on the network provider Cosmic (AS30456), and it shows multiple large dips that correspond to game server outages caused by Aisuru.

BOTNETS R US

Ferguson said he’s been tracking Aisuru for about three months, and recently he noticed the botnet’s composition shifted heavily toward infected systems at ISPs in the United States. Ferguson shared logs from an attack on October 8 that indexed traffic by the total volume sent through each network provider, and the logs showed that 11 of the top 20 traffic sources were U.S. based ISPs.

AT&T customers were by far the biggest U.S. contributors to that attack, followed by botted systems on Charter Communications, Comcast, T-Mobile and Verizon, Ferguson found. He said the volume of data packets per second coming from infected IoT hosts on these ISPs is often so high that it has started to affect the quality of service that ISPs are able to provide to adjacent (non-botted) customers.

“The impact extends beyond victim networks,” Ferguson said. “For instance we have seen 500 gigabits of traffic via Comcast’s network alone. This amount of egress leaving their network, especially being so US-East concentrated, will result in congestion towards other services or content trying to be reached while an attack is ongoing.”

Roland Dobbins is principal engineer at Netscout. Dobbins said Ferguson is spot on, noting that while most ISPs have effective mitigations in place to handle large incoming DDoS attacks, many are far less prepared to manage the inevitable service degradation caused by large numbers of their customers suddenly using some or all available bandwidth to attack others.

“The outbound and cross-bound DDoS attacks can be just as disruptive as the inbound stuff,” Dobbin said. “We’re now in a situation where ISPs are routinely seeing terabit-per-second plus outbound attacks from their networks that can cause operational problems.”

“The crying need for effective and universal outbound DDoS attack suppression is something that is really being highlighted by these recent attacks,” Dobbins continued. “A lot of network operators are learning that lesson now, and there’s going to be a period ahead where there’s some scrambling and potential disruption going on.”

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the ISPs named in Ferguson’s report. Charter Communications pointed to a recent blog post on protecting its network, stating that Charter actively monitors for both inbound and outbound attacks, and that it takes proactive action wherever possible.

“In addition to our own extensive network security, we also aim to reduce the risk of customer connected devices contributing to attacks through our Advanced WiFi solution that includes Security Shield, and we make Security Suite available to our Internet customers,” Charter wrote in an emailed response to questions. “With the ever-growing number of devices connecting to networks, we encourage customers to purchase trusted devices with secure development and manufacturing practices, use anti-virus and security tools on their connected devices, and regularly download security patches.”

A spokesperson for Comcast responded, “Currently our network is not experiencing impacts and we are able to handle the traffic.”

9 YEARS OF MIRAI

Aisuru is built on the bones of malicious code that was leaked in 2016 by the original creators of the Mirai IoT botnet. Like Aisuru, Mirai quickly outcompeted all other DDoS botnets in its heyday, and obliterated previous DDoS attack records with a 620 gigabit-per-second siege that sidelined this website for nearly four days in 2016.

The Mirai botmasters likewise used their crime machine to attack mostly Minecraft servers, but with the goal of forcing Minecraft server owners to purchase a DDoS protection service that they controlled. In addition, they rented out slices of the Mirai botnet to paying customers, some of whom used it to mask the sources of other types of cybercrime, such as click fraud.

Dobbins said Aisuru’s owners also appear to be renting out their botnet as a distributed proxy network that cybercriminal customers anywhere in the world can use to anonymize their malicious traffic and make it appear to be coming from regular residential users in the U.S.

“The people who operate this botnet are also selling (it as) residential proxies,” he said. “And that’s being used to reflect application layer attacks through the proxies on the bots as well.”

The Aisuru botnet harkens back to its predecessor Mirai in another intriguing way. One of its owners is using the Telegram handle “9gigsofram,” which corresponds to the nickname used by the co-owner of a Minecraft server protection service called Proxypipe that was heavily targeted in 2016 by the original Mirai botmasters.

Robert Coelho co-ran Proxypipe back then along with his business partner Erik “9gigsofram” Buckingham, and has spent the past nine years fine-tuning various DDoS mitigation companies that cater to Minecraft server operators and other gaming enthusiasts. Coelho said he has no idea why one of Aisuru’s botmasters chose Buckingham’s nickname, but added that it might say something about how long this person has been involved in the DDoS-for-hire industry.

“The Aisuru attacks on the gaming networks these past seven day have been absolutely huge, and you can see tons of providers going down multiple times a day,” Coelho said.

Coelho said the 15 Tbps attack this week against TCPShield was likely only a portion of the total attack volume hurled by Aisuru at the time, because much of it would have been shoved through networks that simply couldn’t process that volume of traffic all at once. Such outsized attacks, he said, are becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to mitigate.

“It’s definitely at the point now where you need to be spending at least a million dollars a month just to have the network capacity to be able to deal with these attacks,” he said.

RAPID SPREAD

Aisuru has long been rumored to use multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in IoT devices to aid its rapid growth over the past year. XLab, the Chinese security company that was the first to profile Aisuru’s rise in 2024, warned last month that one of the Aisuru botmasters had compromised the firmware distribution website for Totolink, a maker of low-cost routers and other networking gear.

“Multiple sources indicate the group allegedly compromised a router firmware update server in April and distributed malicious scripts to expand the botnet,” XLab wrote on September 15. “The node count is currently reported to be around 300,000.”

Aisuru’s operators received an unexpected boost to their crime machine in August when the U.S. Department Justice charged the alleged proprietor of Rapper Bot, a DDoS-for-hire botnet that competed directly with Aisuru for control over the global pool of vulnerable IoT systems.

Once Rapper Bot was dismantled, Aisuru’s curators moved quickly to commandeer vulnerable IoT devices that were suddenly set adrift by the government’s takedown, Dobbins said.

“Folks were arrested and Rapper Bot control servers were seized and that’s great, but unfortunately the botnet’s attack assets were then pieced out by the remaining botnets,” he said. “The problem is, even if those infected IoT devices are rebooted and cleaned up, they will still get re-compromised by something else generally within minutes of being plugged back in.”

BOTMASTERS AT LARGE

XLab’s September blog post cited multiple unnamed sources saying Aisuru is operated by three cybercriminals: “Snow,” who’s responsible for botnet development; “Tom,” tasked with finding new vulnerabilities; and “Forky,” responsible for botnet sales.

KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Forky in our May 2025 story about the record 6.3 Tbps attack from Aisuru. That story identified Forky as a 21-year-old man from Sao Paulo, Brazil who has been extremely active in the DDoS-for-hire scene since at least 2022. The FBI has seized Forky’s DDoS-for-hire domains several times over the years.

Like the original Mirai botmasters, Forky also operates a DDoS mitigation service called Botshield. Forky declined to discuss the makeup of his ISP’s clientele, or to clarify whether Botshield was more of a hosting provider or a DDoS mitigation firm. However, Forky has posted on Telegram about Botshield successfully mitigating large DDoS attacks launched against other DDoS-for-hire services.

In our previous interview, Forky acknowledged being involved in the development and marketing of Aisuru, but denied participating in attacks launched by the botnet.

Reached for comment earlier this month, Forky continued to maintain his innocence, claiming that he also is still trying to figure out who the current Aisuru botnet operators are in real life (Forky said the same thing in our May interview).

But after a week of promising juicy details, Forky came up empty-handed once again. Suspecting that Forky was merely being coy, I asked him how someone so connected to the DDoS-for-hire world could still be mystified on this point, and suggested that his inability or unwillingness to blame anyone else for Aisuru would not exactly help his case.

At this, Forky verbally bristled at being pressed for more details, and abruptly terminated our interview.

“I’m not here to be threatened with ignorance because you are stressed,” Forky replied. “They’re blaming me for those new attacks. Pretty much the whole world (is) due to your blog.”

Hackers are increasingly adopting the techniques of the Chinese group that successfully infiltrated major telecommunications providers in attacks that made headlines last year by looking for unconventional weak spots, an AT&T executive said Monday.

AT&T was one of the major providers to fall victim to the sweeping campaign from the group, known as Salt Typhoon, but the company has since said it evicted the hackers from its networks.

“We’re seeing adversaries really change the way they’re doing things, very similar to what Salt Typhoon did,” Rich Baich, chief information security officer at AT&T, said at the Google Cloud Cyber Defense Summit.

There were three things that stood out about the way Salt Typhoon approached its campaign, he said. One was hunting for weak points in the company’s ability to find and track malicious activity on physical devices like phones or laptops, known as endpoint detection and response (EDR).

“Traditionally as practitioners, we focused on putting endpoint detection on our devices to help us provide a certain level of protection” Baich said. “Salt Typhoon’s approach was a little bit different. They said, ‘Well, what about all the other platforms that traditionally don’t have an EDR?’ And those platforms then can be utilized in many fashions, carrying out different types of actions.”

“What we need to think about is this: Do we need to have endpoint protection elsewhere, in different platforms?” Baich added. ”So that’s one: They’re going to the areas of least resistance and not spending time trying to combat traditional security controls.”

Another technique that’s growing in use since the Salt Typhoon attacks is “looking for things where we don’t have logs,” he said. Baich said attackers are “re-engineering and thinking of tradecraft techniques that allow them to circumvent known controls, and things that we may do today, but in certain parts of our networks, we may not have those things enabled.”

Lastly, Salt Typhoon and its mimics have been turning to what’s called “living off the land” attacks, where attackers rely on legitimate tools that already exist in a victim’s networks.

“Third thing that they are doing is using the actual administrative tools that we use to perform those functions, so [a lesson for potential victims is] making sure that those are locked down and you understand all the administrative tools that you have in your environment,” Baich said. “All of that is because they’re actually trying to be part of your network.”

The combination of those techniques, as well as a dedication to covering and wiping their tracks to avoid digital forensics probes, means that “we have to be much more efficient operators,” he said. “We have to think outside the box. It’s not just about just having the technology; it’s understanding how to use the technology and understanding how your technology can be used against us.”

Ironically, network defenders might be a victim of their own success, said Rob Joyce, the former cybersecurity director of the National Security Agency.

Defenses for the most-used technology in society today — from mobile phones to web browsers — have gotten very good, Joyce said at the same conference. Vulnerability management, patch management, threat intelligence — all have bolstered defenses, he said.

Because of that, “it just takes exploits chained together in multiple paths to get to success,” said Joyce, who now runs his own cybersecurity consulting firm.

“All of that has advanced us,” he said. “At the same time, we’ve evolved the attackers through that activity. I think by calling out some of the bad behavior, by highlighting the things that have worked or not worked, we’ve pushed people into new exploit methodology.”

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A 21-year-old former Army soldier pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges stemming from a series of attacks and extortion attempts last year on telecommunications companies, including AT&T. 

Cameron John Wagenius, who identified himself as “kiberphant0m” and “cyb3rph4nt0m” on online criminal forums, conducted extensive malicious activity for years, including while he was on active duty, the Justice Department said. 

Wagenius pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire fraud, extortion in relation to computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. He faces a maximum of 27 years in prison for the charges and is scheduled for sentencing on Oct. 6. Wagenius previously pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records information in connection with this conspiracy, the Justice Department said.

“This is one of the most significant wins in the fight against cybercrime,” Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, told CyberScoop. “The cybersecurity workers helping the victims through a storm, federal law enforcement with the fastest federal arrest I have ever witnessed, and the prosecutors now destroying them in court — all brought their A game and they deserve to celebrate tonight.”

Details prosecutors shared about Wagenius as part of their ongoing investigation underscore the bold actions cybercriminals take to extort multiple victims at scale and evade capture. Prior to his arrest in December, Wagenius attempted to sell stolen information to a foreign intelligence service as part of a broader attempt to defect to Russia or another country that he believed would allow him to avoid arrest.

Officials said Wagenius and co-conspirators attempted to defraud at least 10 victim organizations by obtaining login credentials for the organizations’ networks. In November, Wagenius made multiple attempts to extort $500,000 from a major telecommunications company while threatening to leak call records of high-ranking public officials, according to court documents filed in February.

“[Wagenius’] greatest significance is in how absolutely destroyed he’s getting,” Nixon said, adding that he was part of a gang that made threats against Nixon and Unit221B, which specializes in breaking the anonymity of English-speaking cybercriminals.

“He was in the Army, living on base in Texas, when he leaked the hacked call records of President Trump and his family in a failed bid to extort AT&T,” Nixon said. “He pled guilty without even a plea bargain, and the government might still file additional charges. Amazing.”

Authorities did not name Wagenius’ alleged victims in court filings. AT&T in July confirmed cybercriminals accessed the company’s Snowflake environment in April and stole six months of phone and text records of “nearly all” of its customers. 

Wagenius’ alleged co-conspirators, Connor Moucka and John Binns, were indicted in November for allegedly extorting more than 10 organizations after breaking into cloud platforms used by AT&T and other major companies. Moucka, a Canadian citizen, consented to extradition to the United States in March to face 20 federal charges stemming from his alleged involvement in a series of attacks targeting as many as 165 Snowflake customers, one of the most widespread and damaging attack sprees on record.

Some of the records allegedly in Wagenius’ possession were stolen in the attack spree on Snowflake customer databases, according to cybercrime researchers. Federal law enforcement also found evidence on seized Wagenius’ devices indicating he had access to thousands of stolen identification documents and large amounts of cryptocurrency.

Justice Department officials said Wagnius and his co-conspirators attempted to extort at least $1 million from victim data owners. “They successfully sold at least some of this stolen data and also used stolen data to perpetuate other frauds, including SIM-swapping,” officials said in a news release.

“Cybercriminals are shockingly slow to update their threat model, and still operate on the assumption that they won’t be jailed and will get a job in the industry afterwards,” Nixon said. “As multi-decade sentences pile up, reality will set in: Brazen cybercriminals are much more likely to die in prison than they used to, and anonymity isn’t real.”

The post Former Army soldier pleads guilty to widespread attack spree linked to AT&T, Snowflake and others appeared first on CyberScoop.

Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America’s largest Internet service providers (ISPs).

The findings come in a report examining how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine’s domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven’t changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on.

For example, Ukraine’s incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik’s Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks “to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services.”

“Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began,” Ukrtelecom told Madory.

Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs — Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174).

Another Ukrainian Internet provider — LVS (AS43310) — in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T.

Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.

The Ukrainian ISP Trinity (AS43554) went offline in early March 2022 during the bloody siege of Mariupol, but its address space eventually began showing up in more than 50 different networks worldwide. Madory found more than 1,000 of Trinity’s IPv4 addresses suddenly appeared on AT&T’s network.

Why are all these former Ukrainian IP addresses being routed by U.S.-based networks like AT&T? According to spur.us, a company that tracks VPN and proxy services, nearly all of the address ranges identified by Kentik now map to commercial proxy services that allow customers to anonymously route their Internet traffic through someone else’s computer.

From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer. These services can be used for several business purposes, such as price comparisons, sales intelligence, web crawlers and content-scraping bots. However, proxy services also are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

IPv4 address ranges are always in high demand, which means they are also quite valuable. There are now multiple companies that will pay ISPs to lease out their unwanted or unused IPv4 address space. Madory said these IPv4 brokers will pay between $100-$500 per month to lease a block of 256 IPv4 addresses, and very often the entities most willing to pay those rental rates are proxy and VPN providers.

A cursory review of all Internet address blocks currently routed through AT&T — as seen in public records maintained by the Internet backbone provider Hurricane Electric — shows a preponderance of country flags other than the United States, including networks originating in Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Mauritius, Palestine, Seychelles, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

Asked about the apparent high incidence of proxy services routing foreign address blocks through AT&T, the telecommunications giant said it recently changed its policy about originating routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T. That new policy, spelled out in a February 2025 update to AT&T’s terms of service, gives those customers until Sept. 1, 2025 to originate their own IP space from their own autonomous system number (ASN), a unique number assigned to each ISP (AT&T’s is AS7018).

“To ensure our customers receive the best quality of service, we changed our terms for dedicated internet in February 2025,” an AT&T spokesperson said in an emailed reply. “We no longer permit static routes with IP addresses that we have not provided. We have been in the process of identifying and notifying affected customers that they have 90 days to transition to Border Gateway Protocol routing using their own autonomous system number.”

Ironically, the co-mingling of Ukrainian IP address space with proxy providers has resulted in many of these addresses being used in cyberattacks against Ukraine and other enemies of Russia. Earlier this month, the European Union sanctioned Stark Industries Solutions Inc., an ISP that surfaced two weeks before the Russian invasion and quickly became the source of large-scale DDoS attacks and spear-phishing attempts by Russian state-sponsored hacking groups. A deep dive into Stark’s considerable address space showed some of it was sourced from Ukrainian ISPs, and most of it was connected to Russia-based proxy and anonymity services.

Spur’s Chief Technology Officer Riley Kilmer said AT&T’s policy change will likely force many proxy services to migrate to other U.S. providers that have less stringent policies.

“AT&T is the first one of the big ISPs that seems to be actually doing something about this,” Kilmer said. “We track several services that explicitly sell AT&T IP addresses, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to those services come September.”

Still, Kilmer said, there are several other large U.S. ISPs that continue to make it easy for proxy services to bring their own IP addresses and host them in ranges that give the appearance of residential customers. For example, Kentik’s report identified former Ukrainian IP ranges showing up as proxy services routed by Cogent Communications (AS174), a tier-one Internet backbone provider based in Washington, D.C.

Kilmer said Cogent has become an attractive home base for proxy services because it is relatively easy to get Cogent to route an address block.

“In fairness, they transit a lot of traffic,” Kilmer said of Cogent. “But there’s a reason a lot of this proxy stuff shows up as Cogent: Because it’s super easy to get something routed there.”

Cogent declined a request to comment on Kentik’s findings.