In a novel maneuver for a disruption operation against cyber attackers, industry and law enforcement teamed up to conduct a court takedown of two widely-used criminal tools at once rather than individually, Microsoft said Tuesday.

The takedown simultaneously went after Amadey, a botnet that can serve as a malware delivery system, and StealC, an infostealer. Cybercriminals often use them in conjunction and they rely on the same infrastructure, Microsoft said.

“When multiple parts of an operation are disrupted together, attacks are harder to launch, scale, and recover from,” said Steven Masada, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. “The result: fewer disrupted services, fewer opportunities for cybercriminals to profit, and more friction when they try to rebuild. It’s no longer enough to go after threats one by one. We need to interrupt how the attacks are put together.”

Microsoft had been tracking Amadey with ESET, BitSight, Lumen and Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions. Meanwhile, Europol had been investigating StealC alongside law enforcement partners including Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and the Dutch and Danish National Police as well as IBM X-Force and Proofpoint.

They then joined forces and turned to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, used to help authorities go after organized crime, to disrupt more than 200 command-and-control servers. Microsoft said it gained insights from its artificial intelligence product Copilot that “allowed the legal team to treat both malware families as part of a single criminal conspiracy.”

Microsoft regularly leads court-authorized disruption operations, but the industry and law enforcement partnerships combined with AI to expand data collection and identify connections beyond what one company could normally do, it said.

Amadey and StealC were linked to more than 140,000 infected computers around the globe in the first week of May alone, the company said. StealC has ranked among the top infostealers for years since its emergence in 2023 and sells in underground forums as a malware-as-a-service. It’s typically used by Russia-linked groups.

Amadey dates back to 2018, and is also commonly employed by Russian groups, including in attacks on Ukraine.

Their interaction shows the assembly line-like structure of modern cybercrime, Microsoft said. Even if the cybercriminals behind both tools never coordinate, their tools are designed to work together, it said.

“StealC is an infostealer that collects sensitive data from browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, messaging applications, email clients, and gaming platforms,” the company wrote in a separate blog post. “It is a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) offering that threat actors use to generate customized payloads and manage stolen data through a centralized web panel. Meanwhile, Amadey is a MaaS loader that threat actors use to deliver StealC and other malware. Modular, pay-as-you-go models like StealC and Amadey allow threat actors to use a single initial infection to quickly escalate into multiple other threats.”

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Authorities on Thursday disrupted a botnet, a malware framework and seized infrastructure that Evil Corp and other cybercrime groups used to steal data and break into various networks.

The globally coordinated effort targeted SocGholish, multi-stage malware that has compromised websites, redirected users to traffic distribution systems (TDS) and slipped malware into their networks since 2017.

“The malware establishes an initial foothold into victim computers, collectively known as a botnet, and is then used by threat actors for further targeting with ransomware campaigns and espionage,” the FBI’s cyber division said in a statement. 

Cybersecurity firms, researchers and officials from the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Europol took down 106 servers and remediated nearly 15,000 sites that were infected with the malware. Officials also disabled the botnet and notified victims.

Sites infected with SocGholish, which are primarily hosted on WordPress, were widespread and provided everyday services including restaurants and auto repair shops, according to the Dutch National Police. 

The botnet, also known as “FakeUpdates,” is linked to the Russian cybercrime group Evil Corp. It also provided initial access to other ransomware variants, including DoppelPaymer, WastedLoocker, Hades Ransomware, LockBit, RansomHub and others, according to Infoblox, which participated in the takedown. 

Proofpoint, which also participated in the disruption, described Evil Corp as one of the most prominent cybercrime groups in operation and the “grandfather” of a threat type that compromises websites and uses TDS to redirect users to malware.

Following the takedown, the FBI issued a public service announcement warning about cybercriminals using TDS to break into victim networks for ransomware or other financial scams. 

Cybercriminals redirect traffic from sites to bypass firewalls, obscure their activity, identify potential victims and send them to phishing pages to steal credentials, initiate financial scams, access networks, deliver other malware, and sell access to other cybercriminals, officials said.

The law enforcement action was part of Operation Endgame, a multinational effort targeting cybercrime since 2024, and more narrowly for the FBI part of Operation Riptide, an ongoing campaign targeting cybercriminals and the infrastructure and financial networks they use to commit fraud.

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Law enforcement and private partners took down 106 SocGholish C&C servers and domains as part of Operation Endgame.

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For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a “residential proxy” provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd [NASDAQ: ALAR].

Popa is a massive botnet, but by all accounts it is unlike traditional botnets that enlist compromised systems in destructive activities, such as coordinating huge distributed denial-of-service attacks. Rather, Popa appears designed with a singular purpose: Implementing a persistent communications layer capable of registering a device, maintaining long-lived encrypted connections, and opening communication tunnels on demand.

Experts say Popa is a plugin component associated with the Vo1d botnet, a large-scale malware campaign targeting unofficial Android-based TV boxes. These devices, which are marketed under thousands of brand names and model numbers and broadly available for purchase at top e-commerce destinations, all advertise the ability to stream hundreds of subscription video services for an up front one-time fee.

But as the FBI and security industry experts have warned repeatedly, these streaming boxes typically bundle or come pre-installed with software that turns the user’s TV into a “residential proxy” — allowing anyone to route their Internet traffic through that device for as long as it remains plugged into a wall socket and connected to a local network. More concerning, some of these proxy networks do little to stop malicious customers from communicating with and even compromising systems on the local network of the unsuspecting device owner.

The first clues about Popa’s origins came in a 2025 report from the Chinese security company XLAB, which flagged at least nine domain names that were used to register and direct the activities of compromised devices. In a report released today, the security firm Qurium described how it stumbled on some of those same domains while investigating a series of disruptive and expensive data scraping events targeting the company’s hosted organizations in May 2026, in which the scraping activity was scattered evenly across more than 1.4 million Internet addresses.

Qurium said it found several dozen domains used to control Popa that were all hosted in lockstep across multiple Internet addresses over time, including gmslb[.]net, safernetwork[.]io, tera-home[.]com, and ninjatech[.]io. Digging deeper, Qurium discovered gmslb[.]net was referenced in dozens of pirated or modded video content streaming apps, such as CRICFy, DooFlix, Sprozfy, RTS Tv, Flixoid, CyberFlix, Rapid Streamz, TvMob and HD/OceanStreams.

Qurium’s report notes that most of the domains long used to control the Popa botnet were seized or dismantled in July 2025, after Google, HUMAN Security and Trend Micro teamed up to disrupt Badbox 2.0, a botnet that is closely associated with Vo1d. Qurium said that immediately after that disruption, several dozen new domains were registered to serve as controllers for the Popa botnet, but that one of those control domains was not new: ninjatech[.]io.

Ninjatech is a company founded by Moishi Kramer, whose LinkedIn profile says he is vice president of research and development at NetNut. That resume credits Kramer for helping NetNut to build from the “ground up,” “designing the architecture,” and “scaling the NetNut” before the company was acquired by Alarum Technologies. A self-created listing at the job board F6S references Kramer as the sole owner of the Ninjatech domain (a screen capture of it is pictured below).

Responding via email, Mr. Kramer said Ninjatech ceased operations approximately five years ago, when the company sold a software development kit (SDK) called Popa that was designed to use a small portion of a device’s bandwidth and to run only after the host application obtained user consent.

“That code was sold and licensed to third parties including resellers years ago,” Kramer said. “Once software is distributed that way, the original developer has no control over how others later modify, rebrand, or deploy it.”

Kramer said neither he nor NetNut builds, operates or maintains the infrastructure being described as Popa, nor does he control the Ninjatech domain.

“I didn’t register the June 2025 domains you mention, and I don’t know who did,” he continued. “I have no control over, or visibility into, that infrastructure. I can only tell you it isn’t operated by me or by NetNut.”

But in a separate Popa research report released today, the proxy-tracking company Synthient said a recent analysis of the Popa SDK revealed outbound traffic clearly associated with NetNut.

“The research team assesses with high confidence that devices running Popa forward traffic from Netnut clients,” Synthient wrote. “This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Popa actively continues to be used by NetNut as part of their proxy pool.”

Alarum Technologies, NetNut’s Tel Aviv-based parent company, said the reports by Synthient and Qurium contained “demonstrably inaccurate assertions and flawed deductions rather than verified facts.” Alarum shared a statement saying they reject the basic characterization of the SDKs and technologies discussed in the reports as a “botnet.”

“The SDKs at issue are designed to facilitate bandwidth-sharing functionality and do not transform user devices into malware-controlled systems or otherwise compromise the devices on which they operate,” the statement reads. “Netnut operates a commercial proxy network and maintains policies, procedures, and technological measures designed to promote lawful and responsible use of its services.”

Alarum said NetNut places “significant emphasis on appropriate notice and consent mechanisms, conducts customer due diligence, monitors for potential misuse, and takes steps intended to detect and mitigate suspicious or unauthorized activity.”

“This method of operation is supported both by internal procedures and policies, including performing KYC checks and additional due diligence of NetNut’s customers, as well as employing various technological measures, designed to assist in identifying and addressing suspected misuse of the network,” their statement continued.

However, in a report released on June 8, the proxy tracking service Spur asserted that NetNut does not require corporate verification or meaningful “know your customer” procedures before allowing customers to purchase proxy access.

“An individual can sign up, pay, and route traffic through partner address space, including space belonging to institutions whose users never opted in,” Spur wrote. “The ‘verified corporations only’ claim is simply marketing for bandwidth sellers, not an access control on who actually uses the proxies.”

“Nor is NetNut the only front door,” Spur continued. “A number of downstream white labelers and resellers repackage the same ISP proxy pool under their own brands. These outlets typically perform no KYC at all, less scrutiny than NetNut itself, who at the very least might assign an account manager to potential users. Anyone who knows where to look can buy access through a reseller with nothing more than a burner email address and $5 in crypto.”

Synthient found that although the most recent builds of Popa (as of three months ago) have added the ability to ask the user for consent before installing proxy components, not all variants or previous versions of Popa contain this functionality.

“Of the over 20 genuine Popa publishers analyzed, none of them were observed asking for user consent,” Sythient wrote.

THE PREVALENCE OF POPA

Chris Formosa is senior lead information security engineer for Black Lotus Labs, a division of the Internet backbone carrier Lumen Technologies.

“What especially makes Popa dangerous is just how widely used NetNut is for reselling and sharing,” Formosa said, explaining that many other proxy services simply resell NetNut proxies rather than building out their own far-flung proxy networks. “So these Popa IPs appear in tons of different services all over the ecosystem, which makes it one of the most problematic and dangerous proxy botnets on the market currently.”

Formosa said the Popa botnet averages between 1.5 million to 2.5 million distinct IP addresses each day, relying on between 250 and 300 Internet addresses that are used to direct its activities.

“That’s why Popa is so dangerous,” Formosa said. “It may not be the largest botnet we have seen, but it is spread all over the industry, making its power very amplified.”

Formosa said while that makes Popa one of the larger botnets out there today, its numbers pale in comparison to those previously boasted by IPIDEA, a China-based proxy provider that until recently operated a daily pool of nearly 10 million devices that they resold as proxies to anyone. In January 2026, Synthient published research showing that multiple new large DDoS botnets had grown rapidly by tunneling through IPIDEA proxies into the local networks of unsuspecting TV box owners and infecting other Android-based devices behind the user’s firewall.

IPIDEA is based largely on SDKs used to view pirated streaming content on a vast number of TV box devices, but the service’s numbers have dwindled since January, when Google and industry partners took legal action to seize domain names that IPIDEA used to control devices and proxy traffic through them.

Jérôme Meyer, a security researcher at Nokia Deepfield, said the total population of devices participating in the Popa botnet may be far higher than Lumen’s estimates. Meyer told KrebsOnSecurity that Nokia is monitoring 26 of at least 359 known relay nodes for the botnet, and estimates that each relay node handles between 35,000 and 60,000 clients simultaneously.

“On the relay node subset I am looking at (26 of them), 750,000 unique sources in 24 hours,” Meyer wrote in response to questions.

Nokia Deepfield released its own report today on RoboVPN, a VPN app tied to the Vo1d botnet’s Popa plugin that Qurium attributes to NetNut/Alarum Technologies.

THE SYMBIOSIS OF PROXIES AND DATA SCRAPING

Experts say many of the world’s largest proxy providers have updated their public-facing branding to highlight their utility for training AI platforms, implying it is a primary use case for their residential proxies. That’s because AI services tend to rely on constantly mass-scraping the Internet for new text, images and video content that can be used to train large language models (LLMs).

“AI companies depend on web-scraped content: for pre-training, for retrieval, for agent grounding, for search,” reads a report this month from Include Security that examines the prevalence of proxy SDKs in smart TV apps. “But the modern web isn’t scrapeable from a datacenter. Cloudflare, DataDome, HUMAN, among others throttle or block requests from known cloud IPs. The workaround is residential proxies. A scraping job routed through a Comcast or T-Mobile subscriber’s connection arrives at the target site from an IP that belongs to a paying residential customer.”

This non-stop content scraping has spawned more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits against major tech companies that have acknowledged large-scale data scraping as a major source of the “brains” behind their commercial AI offerings. Ironically, much of that scraping is being aided by proxy services that are intimately tied to unofficial Android TV boxes and associated SDKs whose stated purpose is streaming pirated content.

The scraping activity has become so aggressive that it often overwhelms the targeted websites, preventing them from being reachable by legitimate visitors. In many reported cases, nonprofit organizations, libraries and universities have complained of constantly battling to keep their services online in the face of relentless data-scraping firms hiding behind residential proxy services.

A survey conducted last year by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) found while some content scraping bots are rather innocuous, “others are sufficiently aggressive that they are increasingly causing service disruptions in repositories and other scholarly communications infrastructures.” More than 90 percent of survey respondents indicated their repository is encountering aggressive bots, usually more than once a week, and often leading to slow downs and service outages.

“Automated web scraping is nothing new, and has been the key technology underlying search engines such as Google for over 30 years,” wrote Brendan O’Connell, platform manager at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a free, community-curated index of peer-reviewed academic journals. “However, the current investor-fueled AI startup craze means there are now thousands of well-funded companies developing and deploying their own scraping tools to train AI models, alongside existing major players like OpenAI and Google.”

DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!

Across the United States, local communities are pushing back against the proliferation of new data centers aimed primarily at improving the capabilities of AI. But security experts say the general public remains largely unaware that using one of these unsanctioned Android TV boxes means their “smart TV” is almost certainly using a significant amount of bandwidth each month to help train modern AI models.

Even households without these sketchy TV boxes can still have their smart TVs turned into residential proxy nodes, just by downloading one of thousands of apps made available on Samsung and LG smart TVs. Spur said it recently scraped the LG and Samsung app stores and found that each had approximately 3,000 apps available for download. Many of these apps are simple games or utilities that state in the fine print that the user’s Internet connection will be used to download data and that they can opt out at any time.

Spur said it found that more than 42 percent of apps available for download via the webOS operating system on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components, Spur found.

Experts say it’s questionable whether TV apps with proxy SDKs can obtain meaningful consent from users for installing an always-on proxy connection, particularly when anyone in a household — including children — can effectively opt the family TV into a residential proxy network just by installing a simple game or app.

“Privacy-policy disclosure is the wrong control surface for a TV,” Include Security wrote. “It is hard to scroll through a legal document navigated by arrow keys on a remote, and the in-app consent dialog doesn’t convey that a paying customer is about to route their scraping traffic through the user’s home internet.”

Spur’s head of research Sean Simmons told KrebsOnSecurity that most people do not have a working mental model for what it means to sell access to their residential IP address, no matter what device they are using.

“And on a TV, the gap is even wider,” Simmons said. “A one-time prompt navigated with a remote can disappear into the setup flow, while the app keeps monetizing the connection long after anyone remembers what they accepted.”

Simmons said LG and Samsung should follow the lead of other TV platforms that have already drawn a line against residential proxy providers, pointing to policies by Amazon that prohibit apps facilitating proxy services for third parties. Likewise the TV streaming device maker Roku reportedly now bars developers from using proxy SDKs and has removed apps that bundled them.

Apps that turn one’s device into a residential proxy node are not limited to smart TVs and no-name streaming boxes, of course. As noted by the security firm Infoblox, mobile app developers can embed SDKs provided by the residential proxy networks into their products to monetize their software, allowing them to receive a small amount of money on each installation.

The result, Infoblox said, is that devices are frequently enrolled without the owner’s knowledge, typically through free applications such as VPNs, streaming apps, screensavers and “productivity” apps such as PDF viewers and break reminders.

All too often, these proxy services are beaconing out from employee devices brought into the workplace, Infoblox found. In a blog post earlier this month, Infoblox said it discovered that fully 65% of its customer base was querying one or more residential proxy related domains.

“We saw steady growth in these queries in 2025, with a 25% increase over the year to over 500 billion per month,” Infoblox wrote. “Over 90% of our pharmaceutical and food & beverage customers have queried residential proxy indicators. Perhaps even more concerning is that over 60% of government and banking customers have as well.”

Infoblox researchers Nick Sundvall and David Brunsdon warned that with residential proxies in the corporate environment, external access is granted to an organization’s IP space.

“If threat actors were to abuse the residential proxy to attack a third party, the third party’s incident response would, correctly, identify your residential proxy as the source,” they wrote. “Untangling that, by proving that you were the conduit and not the threat actor, costs time, creates legal exposure, and can damage your reputation. The stunning prevalence of these services within customer environments warrants attention from both network defenders and policy makers who should consider how the risks posed by residential proxies could be impacting their security posture.”

Dutch authorities seized command-and-control servers tied to a botnet of infected computers, smartphones, and tablets that was allegedly used to power a residential proxy network and facilitate cybercrime.

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CrowdStrike has dismantled the Glassworm botnet in an operation aided by Google and Shadowserver, stripping the operators’ access to infrastructure that helped threat actors infect hundreds of pieces of open-source software with malware since early 2025, the company said Tuesday. 

The coordinated effort involved the simultaneous takedown of four attacker-controlled servers that were designed to obscure the botnet’s operations and remain resilient against disruptions.

CrowdStrike and partners took down infrastructure, severed access to the botnet’s most critical services, impeded operation momentum and slowed the attackers’ ability to scale, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

“The broader goal is sustained pressure that forces the adversary to spend time, resources, and operational energy reconstituting infrastructure instead of targeting victims,” Meyers added. “By exposing tradecraft and sharing intelligence, defenders can harden developer environments, CI/CD pipelines, and software supply chains against similar activity. That raises the operating cost for the adversary and gives defenders an advantage.”

Glassworm has targeted software developers in order to access source code repositories, cloud platforms, integration and delivery processes, and open-source package registries to push malware into the supply chain and trigger compromises downstream. 

The threat group behind the botnet, which is likely based in Russia, according to CrowdStrike, fed malware into VSCode extensions, npm and Python packages and more than 300 GitHub repositories, researchers said. 

Glassworm affected Windows, macOS and Linux systems with data and credential theft, and a remote-access tool called GlasswormRAT.

“What stood out about Glassworm was the operational sophistication around propagation and automation,” Meyers said. “This wasn’t just a smash-and-grab compromise of a package repository. The operation was designed to move through trusted developer workflows in a way that could expand reach very quickly if left unchecked.”

The botnet relied on four layered channels that CrowdStrike disrupted, including the Solana blockchain, BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer network, Google Calendar and virtual private servers hosted by commercial providers. 

“As part of our disruption efforts, we are working with partners to bring more pain to attackers, especially when we see them abusing our products or targeting our users,” John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said in a post on X.

Piotr Kijewski, CEO of the Shadowserver, said the non-profit organization assisted with some analysis and data sharing but noted the disruption was mostly CrowdStrike work.

The countermeasures took down “the connective tissue of the operation to create cascading operational pain,” Meyers said. “This forces the adversary to rebuild, while exposing tradecraft.”

CrowdStrike said the takedown demonstrates how the security industry can effectively thwart supply-chain threats by proactively disrupting the precise infrastructure attackers use without waiting for lengthy judicial processes. 

“When threat actors operate from jurisdictions where law enforcement cooperation is limited or nonexistent, disruption becomes one of the most effective tools available. If you can’t put handcuffs on the operator, you focus on dismantling the infrastructure, trust relationships, and operational dependencies,” Meyers added. 

The security company shared indicators of compromise to help organizations hunt for potential infections in their environments and called for other vendors, law enforcement agencies, platform operators and the open-source ecosystem to muster equal determination in responding to threats in the software supply chain.

“The more visibility and alignment you create across the ecosystem, the harder it becomes for the actor to quietly stand the operation back up,” Meyers said. “You may not eliminate the threat actor entirely, but you can absolutely reduce effectiveness, limit reach, and raise the cost of doing business.”

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Security firms took down all four command-and-control (C&C) channels used by the GlassWorm malware.

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Jacob Butler, 23, has been arrested in Canada and US authorities are seeking his extradition on computer hacking charges.

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Authorities arrested and unsealed charges against a Canadian man accused of running Kimwolf, one of the most far-reaching DDoS botnets on record, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Jacob Butler was arrested Wednesday in Ottawa, Canada, and awaits extradition to the United States where he is charged with aiding and abetting computer intrusions and, if convicted, faces up to 10 years in prison.

Investigators said the 23-year-old, also known as “Dort,” was a principal administrator of Kimwolf, a variant of the record-setting Aisuru DDoS botnet that spread like wildfire and eventually took over more than 2 million Android TV devices after its operators figured out how to abuse residential-proxy networks for local control.

Authorities in March seized infrastructure powering the Kimwolf, Aisuru, JackSkid and Mossad botnets, which hijacked a combined three million devices and launched more than 300,000 DDoS attacks collectively.

Kimwolf, which operated as a DDoS-for-hire service for other cybercriminals, initiated more than 25,000 attacks, resulting in network outages, disruptions and financial losses exceeding millions of dollars, officials said. Officials also said they found evidence linking Kimwolf to DDoS attacks targeting Department of Defense Information Network IP addresses.

“Kimwolf and the botnets associated with this operation have supported persistent corporate intrusion efforts and been used by a wide range of serious threat actors,” Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox, told CyberScoop.

Authorities searched Butler’s residence during the globally coordinated operation, but did not arrest him until Wednesday, roughly two months later. Officials filed a criminal complaint against Butler in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska in April, and unsealed the complaint following his arrest.

A special agent with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service confirmed Butler’s identity and involvement in the Kimwolf botnet after Butler used the same IP address to access multiple email accounts he controlled and Discord accounts linked to Kimwolf. 

“I have observed significant operational security lapses on Butler’s part resulting in patterns of overlapping IP usage among a Google account in Butler’s true name, other Google accounts that I believe to be controlled by Butler due to use of the same machine cookies, and Discord accounts which have been used in support of the KimWolf operation,” the special agent said in an affidavit. 

“The Discord accounts show patterns of overlapping IP usage with the KimWolf backend server. These IP addresses appear to be proxy or VPN IPs which were likely used by Butler in an unsuccessful attempt to evade law enforcement scrutiny. However, like many cybercriminals, Butler did not use proxy or VPN IP addresses exclusively,” the special agent added. 

Authorities described the botnet takedowns in March in nearly conclusive terms at the time, yet court records indicate the Kimwolf botnet is back in operation. 

“While today’s announcement is encouraging to see, there are still hundreds of millions of insecure IoT and network devices connected to sensitive government, corporate and home networks, and these remain a priority target for threat actors looking to build the next version of Kimwolf,” Edwards said.

“Until we find solutions to this underlying problem,” he added, “we’ll unfortunately continue to play Whac-A-Mole with botnet operators year after year.”

You can read the affidavit supporting the criminal complaint against Butler below.

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The exploitation of the command injection vulnerability started one year after public disclosure and PoC exploit code publication.

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Cybercrime remains a booming business. 

Annual cybercrime losses amounted to almost $20.9 billion last year, reflecting a 26% increase from 2024, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said in its annual report Tuesday.

The comprehensive study exposes a worsening digital crime environment that is driving financial losses, with momentum moving in the wrong direction and compounding at an alarming rate. Annual cybercrime losses have jumped almost 400% from $4.2 billion in 2020, and cumulative losses in that five-year period surpassed $71.3 billion.

The FBI’s IC3, which formed as the country’s central hub for cybercrime reporting in 2000, is busier than ever. “We now average almost 3,000 complaints per day,” Jose Perez, the FBI’s operations director for its criminal and cyber branch, wrote in the report. 

The annual internet crime report highlights growing and sustaining trends. Yet, the scope of the study is limited and relies entirely on cybercrime incidents submitted to the FBI. 

The full impact of cybercrime remains murky, as an unknown number of victims suffer in the shadows and never report the crimes they endure.

The FBI received more than 1 million complaints last year, with victims aged over 60 reporting the largest amount of crimes that also resulted in the greatest amount of total losses by age group. Victims at least 60 years old filed 201,000 complaints with losses totaling nearly $7.75 billion, or about 37% of all cybercrime-related losses last year.

Investment-related fraud remained the largest component of cybercrime losses in 2025, reaching almost $8.65 billion. Business email compromise took the No. 2 spot with almost $3.05 billion in losses, followed by tech support scams at more than $2.1 billion. 

Cryptocurrency was the primary conduit for fraud linked to investment and tech support scams last year, while wire transfers composed the bulk of fraud resulting from business email compromise, according to the report.

Phishing was the most commonly reported type of cybercrime last year, followed by extortion, investment scams and personal data breaches. The FBI tallied losses amounting to $122.5 million from extortion and $32.3 million from ransomware last year.

The FBI also received more than 75,000 reports of sextortion last year, including more than 5,700 submissions that were referred to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The top five cyber threats reported to IC3 in 2025 included data breaches at 39%, ransomware at 36%, SIM swapping at 10%, malware at 9% and botnets at 7%. 

The FBI received more than 3,600 complaints reporting ransomware last year. The five most reported variants included Akira, Qilin, INC, BianLian and Play.

Each of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors reported ransomware attacks last year, and the most heavily targeted included health care, manufacturing, financial services, government and IT.

The IC3 primarily receives complaints from U.S. residents and businesses, but it also received complaints from more than 200 countries last year, which accounted for nearly $1.6 billion in total losses. 

While losses and the sheer amount of cybercrime continued to climb last year, “the FBI continues to disrupt and deter malicious cyber actors — and shift the cost from victims to our adversaries,” Perez wrote in the report.

“It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint, and electronic interactions,” he added. “Cyber threats and cyber-enabled crime will continue to evolve as the world embraces emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.”

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Authorities seized infrastructure powering four botnets that hijacked a combined three million devices and launched more than 300,000 DDoS attacks collectively, the Justice Department said Thursday.

The botnets — Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid and Mossad — enabled operators to sell access to the infected devices for various cybercrimes. The aftermath spanned thousands of attacks, including some demanding extortion payments from victims, officials said.

The globally coordinated operation, aided by law enforcement actions targeting the botnets’ operators in Canada and Germany, disrupted the command-and-control infrastructure for all four botnets. Two of the botnets set records before the takedown, attracting widespread attention from security researchers and vendors.

The Kimwolf botnet, an Android variant of Aisuru, spread like wildfire after its operators figured out how to abuse residential-proxy networks for local control, according to Sythient. It eventually took over more than 2 million Android TV devices by January. In September, just as Kimwolf was forming, Cloudflare clocked the Aisuru botnet hitting a record-breaking 29.7 terabits-per-second DDoS attack that lasted 69 seconds.

Officials ultimately attributed roughly 200,000 DDoS attacks to Aisuru, 90,000 to JackSkid, 25,000 to Kimwolf and about 1,000 DDoS attack commands to the Mossad botnet. Yet, DDoS attacks from financially-motivated attackers are typically a distraction or misdirection.

“Oftentimes a DDoS attack is just advertising for the size of an operator’s botnet,” Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox, told CyberScoop. Botnet operators cash out by renting these controlled devices to cybercriminals for account abuse, password reset attacks, ad fraud schemes and residential proxy nodes, he added.

Devices infected by the four botnets include digital video recorders, web cameras, Wi-Fi routers and TV boxes. Hundreds of thousands of these devices are located in the United States, federal prosecutors said. 

Authorities did not name the people involved or formally announce any arrests. Yet, they describe the operation in nearly conclusive terms, claiming the action disrupted the botnets’ communications infrastructure — domains, virtual servers and other systems — to prevent further infection and limit or eliminate the botnets’ ability to launch future attacks.

“Cybercriminals infiltrate infrastructure beyond physical borders and Defense Criminal Investigative Service participates in international operations to help safeguard the Department’s global footprint,” Kenneth DeChellis, special agent in charge at the Defense Department’s DCIS cyber field office, said in a statement. Some of the DDoS attacks attributed to these botnets reached IP’s owned by the Department of Defense Information Network.

Botnets often compete for devices to infect and opportunities to scale. As Kimwolf spread and hit those objectives, it captured sweeping interest from researchers, authorities and vendors in a position to help stop it. 

Kimwolf was the largest DDoS botnet ever detected, according to Tom Scholl, vice president at Amazon Web Services, which assisted the operation. “The scale of this botnet is staggering,” he said in a LinkedIn post. 

“Kimwolf represented a fundamental shift in how botnets operate and scale,” Scholl added. “Unlike traditional botnets that scan the open internet for vulnerable devices, Kimwolf exploited a novel attack vector: residential proxy networks.”

Under this mechanism, any organization with vulnerable devices connected to the internet could unwittingly have those devices turned into a node for a botnet or a foothold for a targeted attack.

“This isn’t just some problem that your cousin has because he bought some cheap TV box that promised him free TV channels,” Edwards said. Infoblox previously said nearly 25% of customers had at least one endpoint device in a residential proxy service targeted by Kimwolf.

While it’s intellectually interesting whenever a botnet scales to extraordinary size, it’s also a “sad reminder that oftentimes security takes a back seat to convenience and cost,” Edwards said. 

“The botnets are growing because more and more people are buying weird internet-connected stuff,” he added. “Nothing in this world is free.”

The takedowns mark a continuation of a consistent, ongoing crackdown targeting large-scale botnets, cybercrime marketplaces, malware, infostealers and other cybercrime tools. Some of the malicious networks hampered or rendered nonoperational by disruptions and arrests during the past year include: DanaBot, Rapper Bot, Lumma Stealer, AVCheck and SocksEscort.

More than 20 companies and organizations assisted with the coordinated disruption, including law enforcement from the Netherlands and Europol. Efforts to stop botnets will continue as these malicious networks proliferate in new places and new ways. 

“We’re living in a device-compromise–DDOS-botnet-merry-go-round and while many of us wish something could slow it down, the challenges continue to grow,” Edwards said. “This is still a bad day for serious threat actors, and any day like that is something we should all celebrate.”

The post Justice Department disrupts botnet networks that hijacked 3 million devices appeared first on CyberScoop.

The U.S. Justice Department joined authorities in Canada and Germany in dismantling the online infrastructure behind four highly disruptive botnets that compromised more than three million Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as routers and web cameras. The feds say the four botnets — named Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid and Mossad — are responsible for a series of recent record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking nearly any target offline.

The Justice Department said the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General’s (DoDIG) Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) executed seizure warrants targeting multiple U.S.-registered domains, virtual servers, and other infrastructure involved in DDoS attacks against Internet addresses owned by the DoD.

The government alleges the unnamed people in control of the four botnets used their crime machines to launch hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks, often demanding extortion payments from victims. Some victims reported tens of thousands of dollars in losses and remediation expenses.

The oldest of the botnets — Aisuru — issued more than 200,000 attacks commands, while JackSkid hurled at least 90,000 attacks. Kimwolf issued more than 25,000 attack commands, the government said, while Mossad was blamed for roughy 1,000 digital sieges.

The DOJ said the law enforcement action was designed to prevent further infection to victim devices and to limit or eliminate the ability of the botnets to launch future attacks. The case is being investigated by the DCIS with help from the FBI’s field office in Anchorage, Alaska, and the DOJ’s statement credits nearly two dozen technology companies with assisting in the operation.

“By working closely with DCIS and our international law enforcement partners, we collectively identified and disrupted criminal infrastructure used to carry out large-scale DDoS attacks,” said Special Agent in Charge Rebecca Day of the FBI Anchorage Field Office.

Aisuru emerged in late 2024, and by mid-2025 it was launching record-breaking DDoS attacks as it rapidly infected new IoT devices. In October 2025, Aisuru was used to seed Kimwolf, an Aisuru variant which introduced a novel spreading mechanism that allowed the botnet to infect devices hidden behind the protection of the user’s internal network.

On January 2, 2026, the security firm Synthient publicly disclosed the vulnerability Kimwolf was using to propagate so quickly. That disclosure helped curtail Kimwolf’s spread somewhat, but since then several other IoT botnets have emerged that effectively copy Kimwolf’s spreading methods while competing for the same pool of vulnerable devices. According to the DOJ, the JackSkid botnet also sought out systems on internal networks just like Kimwolf.

The DOJ said its disruption of the four botnets coincided with “law enforcement actions” conducted in Canada and Germany targeting individuals who allegedly operated those botnets, although no further details were available on the suspected operators.

In late February, KrebsOnSecurity identified a 22-year-old Canadian man as a core operator of the Kimwolf botnet. Multiple sources familiar with the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the other prime suspect is a 15-year-old living in Germany.

Authorities from multiple countries dismantled SocksEscort, a residential proxy network cybercriminals used to commit large-scale fraud, claiming access to about 369,000 IP addresses since 2020, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Europol, which aided the investigation alongside various law enforcement agencies, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs and the Shadowserver Foundation, said the malicious proxy service compromised routers and IoT devices in 163 countries. Officials said the proxy network’s payment platform received about $5.8 million from its customers.

The globally coordinated action, dubbed Operation Lightning, took down and seized 34 domains and 23 servers in seven countries. U.S. officials froze a combined $3.5 million in cryptocurrency allegedly linked to the botnet that was created from infected devices.

“Cybercrime thrives on anonymity,” Catherine De Bolle, executive director at Europol, said in a statement. “Proxy services like SocksEscort provide criminals with the digital cover they need to launch attacks, distribute illegal content and evade detection.”

SocksEscort’s operators assembled the botnet by exploiting a vulnerability in residential modems from an unnamed vendor, according to officials.

The cybercrime operation defrauded Americans and U.S. businesses of millions of dollars, the Justice Department said. More than one-quarter of the 8,000 infected routers SocksEscort advertised in February were based in the United States.  

SocksEscort began operating in 2009 and its command-and-control infrastructure went undetected by most tools for a very long time, Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop.

The botnet’s infrastructure, which was powered by AVRecon malware, was elusive and maintained a consistently high volume, claiming an average 20,000 victims weekly since early 2024. Its impact peaked in January 2025 when it ensnared more than 15,000 victims daily, according to Black Lotus Labs’ research. 

The company said it observed 280,000 unique IPs as victims of the proxy network since early 2025, and more than half of SocksEscort’s victims were based in the United States and United Kingdom.

“Given the high volume of victim generation, it would not surprise me if they eventually hit something really important that moved them up the list of networks to go after,” Chris Formosa, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. 

“They were exclusively marketing to cybercriminals and nowhere else,” he added. “With a network like this, once law enforcement gains legal access to backend infrastructure it can give them a lot of intelligence on other threat actors besides the botnet operators.”

Various agencies from Austria, Bulgaria, Eurojust, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Romania assisted in the investigation and takedown.

The post Authorities takedown global proxy network SocksEscort appeared first on CyberScoop.

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to build Kimwolf, the world’s largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf — who goes by the handle “Dort” — has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this author, and more recently caused a SWAT team to be sent to the researcher’s home. This post examines what is knowable about Dort based on public information.

A public “dox” created in 2020 asserted Dort was a teenager from Canada (DOB August 2003) who used the aliases “CPacket” and “M1ce.” A search on the username CPacket at the open source intelligence platform OSINT Industries finds a GitHub account under the names Dort and CPacket that was created in 2017 using the email address jay.miner232@gmail.com.

The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says jay.miner232@gmail.com was used between 2015 and 2019 to create accounts at multiple cybercrime forums, including Nulled (username “Uubuntuu”) and Cracked (user “Dorted”); Intel 471 reports that both of these accounts were created from the same Internet address at Rogers Canada (99.241.112.24).

Dort was an extremely active player in the Microsoft game Minecraft who gained notoriety for their “Dortware” software that helped players cheat. But somewhere along the way, Dort graduated from hacking Minecraft games to enabling far more serious crimes.

Dort also used the nickname DortDev, an identity that was active in March 2022 on the chat server for the prolific cybercrime group known as LAPSUS$. Dort peddled a service for registering temporary email addresses, as well as “Dortsolver,” code that could bypass various CAPTCHA services designed to prevent automated account abuse. Both of these offerings were advertised in 2022 on SIM Land, a Telegram channel dedicated to SIM-swapping and account takeover activity.

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint indexed 2022 posts on SIM Land by Dort that show this person developed the disposable email and CAPTCHA bypass services with the help of another hacker who went by the handle “Qoft.”

“I legit just work with Jacob,” Qoft said in 2022 in reply to another user, referring to their exclusive business partner Dort. In the same conversation, Qoft bragged that the two had stolen more than $250,000 worth of Microsoft Xbox Game Pass accounts by developing a program that mass-created Game Pass identities using stolen payment card data.

Who is the Jacob that Qoft referred to as their business partner? The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds the password used by jay.miner232@gmail.com was reused by just one other email address: jacobbutler803@gmail.com. Recall that the 2020 dox of Dort said their date of birth was August 2003 (8/03).

Searching this email address at DomainTools.com reveals it was used in 2015 to register several Minecraft-themed domains, all assigned to a Jacob Butler in Ottawa, Canada and to the Ottawa phone number 613-909-9727.

Constella Intelligence finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com was used to register an account on the hacker forum Nulled in 2016, as well as the account name “M1CE” on Minecraft. Pivoting off the password used by their Nulled account shows it was shared by the email addresses j.a.y.m.iner232@gmail.com and jbutl3@ocdsb.ca, the latter being an address at a domain for the Ottawa-Carelton District School Board.

Data indexed by the breach tracking service Spycloud suggests that at one point Jacob Butler shared a computer with his mother and a sibling, which might explain why their email accounts were connected to the password “jacobsplugs.” Neither Jacob nor any of the other Butler household members responded to requests for comment.

The open source intelligence service Epieos finds jacobbutler803@gmail.com created the GitHub account “MemeClient.” Meanwhile, Flashpoint indexed a deleted anonymous Pastebin.com post from 2017 declaring that MemeClient was the creation of a user named CPacket — one of Dort’s early monikers.

Why is Dort so mad? On January 2, KrebsOnSecurity published The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network, which explored research into the botnet by Benjamin Brundage, founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient. Brundage figured out that the Kimwolf botmasters were exploiting a little-known weakness in residential proxy services to infect poorly-defended devices — like TV boxes and digital photo frames — plugged into the internal, private networks of proxy endpoints.

By the time that story went live, most of the vulnerable proxy providers had been notified by Brundage and had fixed the weaknesses in their systems. That vulnerability remediation process massively slowed Kimwolf’s ability to spread, and within hours of the story’s publication Dort created a Discord server in my name that began publishing personal information about and violent threats against Brundage, Yours Truly, and others.

Last week, Dort and friends used that same Discord server (then named “Krebs’s Koinbase Kallers”) to threaten a swatting attack against Brundage, again posting his home address and personal information. Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that local police officers subsequently visited his home in response to a swatting hoax which occurred around the same time that another member of the server posted a door emoji and taunted Brundage further.

Someone on the server then linked to a cringeworthy (and NSFW) new Soundcloud diss track recorded by the user DortDev that included a stickied message from Dort saying, “Ur dead nigga. u better watch ur fucking back. sleep with one eye open. bitch.”

“It’s a pretty hefty penny for a new front door,” the diss track intoned. “If his head doesn’t get blown off by SWAT officers. What’s it like not having a front door?”

With any luck, Dort will soon be able to tell us all exactly what it’s like.

Update, 10:29 a.m.: Jacob Butler responded to requests for comment, speaking with KrebsOnSecurity briefly via telephone. Butler said he didn’t notice earlier requests for comment because he hasn’t really been online since 2021, after his home was swatted multiple times. He acknowledged making and distributing a Minecraft cheat long ago, but said he hasn’t played the game in years and was not involved in Dortsolver or any other activity attributed to the Dort nickname after 2021.

“It was a really old cheat and I don’t remember the name of it,” Butler said of his Minecraft modification. “I’m very stressed, man. I don’t know if people are going to swat me again or what. After that, I pretty much walked away from everything, logged off and said fuck that. I don’t go online anymore. I don’t know why people would still be going after me, to be completely honest.”

When asked what he does for a living, Butler said he mostly stays home and helps his mom around the house because he struggles with autism and social interaction. He maintains that someone must have compromised one or more of his old accounts and is impersonating him online as Dort.

“Someone is actually probably impersonating me, and now I’m really worried,” Butler said. “This is making me relive everything.”

But there are issues with Butler’s timeline. For example, Jacob’s voice in our phone conversation was remarkably similar to the Jacob/Dort whose voice can be heard in this Sept. 2022 Clash of Code competition between Dort and another coder (Dort lost). At around 6 minutes and 10 seconds into the recording, Dort launches into a cursing tirade that mirrors the stream of profanity in the diss rap that Dortdev posted threatening Brundage. Dort can be heard again at around 16 minutes; at around 26:00, Dort threatens to swat his opponent.

Butler said the voice of Dort is not his, exactly, but rather that of an impersonator who had likely cloned his voice.

“I would like to clarify that was absolutely not me,” Butler said. “There must be someone using a voice changer. Or something of the sorts. Because people were cloning my voice before and sending audio clips of ‘me’ saying outrageous stuff.”

Further reading:

Jan. 8, 2026: Who Benefited from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?

Jan. 20, 2026: Kimwolf Botnet Lurking in Corporate, Govt. Networks

Jan. 26, 2026: Who Operates the Badbox 2.0 Botnet?

Feb. 11, 2026: Kimwolf Botnet Swamps Anonymity Network I2P

Mar. 19, 2026: Feds Disrupt IoT Botnets Behind Huge DDoS Attacks

For the past week, the massive “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet known as Kimwolf has been disrupting The Invisible Internet Project (I2P), a decentralized, encrypted communications network designed to anonymize and secure online communications. I2P users started reporting disruptions in the network around the same time the Kimwolf botmasters began relying on it to evade takedown attempts against the botnet’s control servers.

Kimwolf is a botnet that surfaced in late 2025 and quickly infected millions of systems, turning poorly secured IoT devices like TV streaming boxes, digital picture frames and routers into relays for malicious traffic and abnormally large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

I2P is a decentralized, privacy-focused network that allows people to communicate and share information anonymously.

“It works by routing data through multiple encrypted layers across volunteer-operated nodes, hiding both the sender’s and receiver’s locations,” the I2P website explains. “The result is a secure, censorship-resistant network designed for private websites, messaging, and data sharing.”

On February 3, I2P users began complaining on the organization’s GitHub page about tens of thousands of routers suddenly overwhelming the network, preventing existing users from communicating with legitimate nodes. Users reported a rapidly increasing number of new routers joining the network that were unable to transmit data, and that the mass influx of new systems had overwhelmed the network to the point where users could no longer connect.

When one I2P user asked whether the network was under attack, another user replied, “Looks like it. My physical router freezes when the number of connections exceeds 60,000.”

The same day that I2P users began noticing the outages, the individuals in control of Kimwolf posted to their Discord channel that they had accidentally disrupted I2P after attempting to join 700,000 Kimwolf-infected bots as nodes on the network.

Although Kimwolf is known as a potent weapon for launching DDoS attacks, the outages caused this week by some portion of the botnet attempting to join I2P are what’s known as a “Sybil attack,” a threat in peer-to-peer networks where a single entity can disrupt the system by creating, controlling, and operating a large number of fake, pseudonymous identities.

Indeed, the number of Kimwolf-infected routers that tried to join I2P this past week was many times the network’s normal size. I2P’s Wikipedia page says the network consists of roughly 55,000 computers distributed throughout the world, with each participant acting as both a router (to relay traffic) and a client.

However, Lance James, founder of the New York City based cybersecurity consultancy Unit 221B and the original founder of I2P, told KrebsOnSecurity the entire I2P network now consists of between 15,000 and 20,000 devices on any given day.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services and was the first to document Kimwolf’s unique spreading techniques. Brundage said the Kimwolf operator(s) have been trying to build a command and control network that can’t easily be taken down by security companies and network operators that are working together to combat the spread of the botnet.

Brundage said the people in control of Kimwolf have been experimenting with using I2P and a similar anonymity network — Tor — as a backup command and control network, although there have been no reports of widespread disruptions in the Tor network recently.

“I don’t think their goal is to take I2P down,” he said. “It’s more they’re looking for an alternative to keep the botnet stable in the face of takedown attempts.”

The Kimwolf botnet created challenges for Cloudflare late last year when it began instructing millions of infected devices to use Cloudflare’s domain name system (DNS) settings, causing control domains associated with Kimwolf to repeatedly usurp Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites.

James said the I2P network is still operating at about half of its normal capacity, and that a new release is rolling out which should bring some stability improvements over the next week for users.

Meanwhile, Brundage said the good news is Kimwolf’s overlords appear to have quite recently alienated some of their more competent developers and operators, leading to a rookie mistake this past week that caused the botnet’s overall numbers to drop by more than 600,000 infected systems.

“It seems like they’re just testing stuff, like running experiments in production,” he said. “But the botnet’s numbers are dropping significantly now, and they don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

The story you are reading is a series of scoops nestled inside a far more urgent Internet-wide security advisory. The vulnerability at issue has been exploited for months already, and it’s time for a broader awareness of the threat. The short version is that everything you thought you knew about the security of the internal network behind your Internet router probably is now dangerously out of date.

The past few months have witnessed the explosive growth of a new botnet dubbed Kimwolf, which experts say has infected more than 2 million devices globally. The Kimwolf malware forces compromised systems to relay malicious and abusive Internet traffic — such as ad fraud, account takeover attempts and mass content scraping — and participate in crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking nearly any website offline for days at a time.

More important than Kimwolf’s staggering size, however, is the diabolical method it uses to spread so quickly: By effectively tunneling back through various “residential proxy” networks and into the local networks of the proxy endpoints, and by further infecting devices that are hidden behind the assumed protection of the user’s firewall and Internet router.

Residential proxy networks are sold as a way for customers to anonymize and localize their Web traffic to a specific region, and the biggest of these services allow customers to route their traffic through devices in virtually any country or city around the globe.

The malware that turns an end-user’s Internet connection into a proxy node is often bundled with dodgy mobile apps and games. These residential proxy programs also are commonly installed via unofficial Android TV boxes sold by third-party merchants on popular e-commerce sites like Amazon, BestBuy, Newegg, and Walmart.

These TV boxes range in price from $40 to $400, are marketed under a dizzying range of no-name brands and model numbers, and frequently are advertised as a way to stream certain types of subscription video content for free. But there’s a hidden cost to this transaction: As we’ll explore in a moment, these TV boxes make up a considerable chunk of the estimated two million systems currently infected with Kimwolf.

Kimwolf also is quite good at infecting a range of Internet-connected digital photo frames that likewise are abundant at major e-commerce websites. In November 2025, researchers from Quokka published a report (PDF) detailing serious security issues in Android-based digital picture frames running the Uhale app — including Amazon’s bestselling digital frame as of March 2025.

There are two major security problems with these photo frames and unofficial Android TV boxes. The first is that a considerable percentage of them come with malware pre-installed, or else require the user to download an unofficial Android App Store and malware in order to use the device for its stated purpose (video content piracy). The most typical of these uninvited guests are small programs that turn the device into a residential proxy node that is resold to others.

The second big security nightmare with these photo frames and unsanctioned Android TV boxes is that they rely on a handful of Internet-connected microcomputer boards that have no discernible security or authentication requirements built-in. In other words, if you are on the same network as one or more of these devices, you can likely compromise them simultaneously by issuing a single command across the network.

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1

The combination of these two security realities came to the fore in October 2025, when an undergraduate computer science student at the Rochester Institute of Technology began closely tracking Kimwolf’s growth, and interacting directly with its apparent creators on a daily basis.

Benjamin Brundage is the 22-year-old founder of the security firm Synthient, a startup that helps companies detect proxy networks and learn how those networks are being abused. Conducting much of his research into Kimwolf while studying for final exams, Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity in late October 2025 he suspected Kimwolf was a new Android-based variant of Aisuru, a botnet that was incorrectly blamed for a number of record-smashing DDoS attacks last fall.

Brundage says Kimwolf grew rapidly by abusing a glaring vulnerability in many of the world’s largest residential proxy services. The crux of the weakness, he explained, was that these proxy services weren’t doing enough to prevent their customers from forwarding requests to internal servers of the individual proxy endpoints.

Most proxy services take basic steps to prevent their paying customers from “going upstream” into the local network of proxy endpoints, by explicitly denying requests for local addresses specified in RFC-1918, including the well-known Network Address Translation (NAT) ranges 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, and 172.16.0.0/12. These ranges allow multiple devices in a private network to access the Internet using a single public IP address, and if you run any kind of home or office network, your internal address space operates within one or more of these NAT ranges.

However, Brundage discovered that the people operating Kimwolf had figured out how to talk directly to devices on the internal networks of millions of residential proxy endpoints, simply by changing their Domain Name System (DNS) settings to match those in the RFC-1918 address ranges.

“It is possible to circumvent existing domain restrictions by using DNS records that point to 192.168.0.1 or 0.0.0.0,” Brundage wrote in a first-of-its-kind security advisory sent to nearly a dozen residential proxy providers in mid-December 2025. “This grants an attacker the ability to send carefully crafted requests to the current device or a device on the local network. This is actively being exploited, with attackers leveraging this functionality to drop malware.”

As with the digital photo frames mentioned above, many of these residential proxy services run solely on mobile devices that are running some game, VPN or other app with a hidden component that turns the user’s mobile phone into a residential proxy — often without any meaningful consent.

In a report published today, Synthient said key actors involved in Kimwolf were observed monetizing the botnet through app installs, selling residential proxy bandwidth, and selling its DDoS functionality.

“Synthient expects to observe a growing interest among threat actors in gaining unrestricted access to proxy networks to infect devices, obtain network access, or access sensitive information,” the report observed. “Kimwolf highlights the risks posed by unsecured proxy networks and their viability as an attack vector.”

ANDROID DEBUG BRIDGE

After purchasing a number of unofficial Android TV box models that were most heavily represented in the Kimwolf botnet, Brundage further discovered the proxy service vulnerability was only part of the reason for Kimwolf’s rapid rise: He also found virtually all of the devices he tested were shipped from the factory with a powerful feature called Android Debug Bridge (ADB) mode enabled by default.

ADB is a diagnostic tool intended for use solely during the manufacturing and testing processes, because it allows the devices to be remotely configured and even updated with new (and potentially malicious) firmware. However, shipping these devices with ADB turned on creates a security nightmare because in this state they constantly listen for and accept unauthenticated connection requests.

For example, opening a command prompt and typing “adb connect” along with a vulnerable device’s (local) IP address followed immediately by “:5555” will very quickly offer unrestricted “super user” administrative access.

Brundage said by early December, he’d identified a one-to-one overlap between new Kimwolf infections and proxy IP addresses offered for rent by China-based IPIDEA, currently the world’s largest residential proxy network by all accounts.

“Kimwolf has almost doubled in size this past week, just by exploiting IPIDEA’s proxy pool,” Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity in early December as he was preparing to notify IPIDEA and 10 other proxy providers about his research.

Brundage said Synthient first confirmed on December 1, 2025 that the Kimwolf botnet operators were tunneling back through IPIDEA’s proxy network and into the local networks of systems running IPIDEA’s proxy software. The attackers dropped the malware payload by directing infected systems to visit a specific Internet address and to call out the pass phrase “krebsfiveheadindustries” in order to unlock the malicious download.

On December 30, Synthient said it was tracking roughly 2 million IPIDEA addresses exploited by Kimwolf in the previous week. Brundage said he has witnessed Kimwolf rebuilding itself after one recent takedown effort targeting its control servers — from almost nothing to two million infected systems just by tunneling through proxy endpoints on IPIDEA for a couple of days.

Brundage said IPIDEA has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new proxies, advertising access to more than 100 million residential proxy endpoints around the globe in the past week alone. Analyzing the exposed devices that were part of IPIDEA’s proxy pool, Synthient said it found more than two-thirds were Android devices that could be compromised with no authentication needed.

SECURITY NOTIFICATION AND RESPONSE

After charting a tight overlap in Kimwolf-infected IP addresses and those sold by IPIDEA, Brundage was eager to make his findings public: The vulnerability had clearly been exploited for several months, although it appeared that only a handful of cybercrime actors were aware of the capability. But he also knew that going public without giving vulnerable proxy providers an opportunity to understand and patch it would only lead to more mass abuse of these services by additional cybercriminal groups.

On December 17, Brundage sent a security notification to all 11 of the apparently affected proxy providers, hoping to give each at least a few weeks to acknowledge and address the core problems identified in his report before he went public. Many proxy providers who received the notification were resellers of IPIDEA that white-labeled the company’s service.

KrebsOnSecurity first sought comment from IPIDEA in October 2025, in reporting on a story about how the proxy network appeared to have benefitted from the rise of the Aisuru botnet, whose administrators appeared to shift from using the botnet primarily for DDoS attacks to simply installing IPIDEA’s proxy program, among others.

On December 25, KrebsOnSecurity received an email from an IPIDEA employee identified only as “Oliver,” who said allegations that IPIDEA had benefitted from Aisuru’s rise were baseless.

“After comprehensively verifying IP traceability records and supplier cooperation agreements, we found no association between any of our IP resources and the Aisuru botnet, nor have we received any notifications from authoritative institutions regarding our IPs being involved in malicious activities,” Oliver wrote. “In addition, for external cooperation, we implement a three-level review mechanism for suppliers, covering qualification verification, resource legality authentication and continuous dynamic monitoring, to ensure no compliance risks throughout the entire cooperation process.”

“IPIDEA firmly opposes all forms of unfair competition and malicious smearing in the industry, always participates in market competition with compliant operation and honest cooperation, and also calls on the entire industry to jointly abandon irregular and unethical behaviors and build a clean and fair market ecosystem,” Oliver continued.

Meanwhile, the same day that Oliver’s email arrived, Brundage shared a response he’d just received from IPIDEA’s security officer, who identified himself only by the first name Byron. The security officer said IPIDEA had made a number of important security changes to its residential proxy service to address the vulnerability identified in Brundage’s report.

“By design, the proxy service does not allow access to any internal or local address space,” Byron explained. “This issue was traced to a legacy module used solely for testing and debugging purposes, which did not fully inherit the internal network access restrictions. Under specific conditions, this module could be abused to reach internal resources. The affected paths have now been fully blocked and the module has been taken offline.”

Byron told Brundage IPIDEA also instituted multiple mitigations for blocking DNS resolution to internal (NAT) IP ranges, and that it was now blocking proxy endpoints from forwarding traffic on “high-risk” ports “to prevent abuse of the service for scanning, lateral movement, or access to internal services.”

Brundage said IPIDEA appears to have successfully patched the vulnerabilities he identified. He also noted he never observed the Kimwolf actors targeting proxy services other than IPIDEA, which has not responded to requests for comment.

Riley Kilmer is founder of Spur.us, a technology firm that helps companies identify and filter out proxy traffic. Kilmer said Spur has tested Brundage’s findings and confirmed that IPIDEA and all of its affiliate resellers indeed allowed full and unfiltered access to the local LAN.

Kilmer said one model of unsanctioned Android TV boxes that is especially popular — the Superbox, which we profiled in November’s Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet? — leaves Android Debug Mode running on localhost:5555.

“And since Superbox turns the IP into an IPIDEA proxy, a bad actor just has to use the proxy to localhost on that port and install whatever bad SDKs [software development kits] they want,” Kilmer told KrebsOnSecurity.

ECHOES FROM THE PAST

Both Brundage and Kilmer say IPIDEA appears to be the second or third reincarnation of a residential proxy network formerly known as 911S5 Proxy, a service that operated between 2014 and 2022 and was wildly popular on cybercrime forums. 911S5 Proxy imploded a week after KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on the service’s sketchy origins and leadership in China.

In that 2022 profile, we cited work by researchers at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada who were studying the threat 911S5 could pose to internal corporate networks. The researchers noted that “the infection of a node enables the 911S5 user to access shared resources on the network such as local intranet portals or other services.”

“It also enables the end user to probe the LAN network of the infected node,” the researchers explained. “Using the internal router, it would be possible to poison the DNS cache of the LAN router of the infected node, enabling further attacks.”

911S5 initially responded to our reporting in 2022 by claiming it was conducting a top-down security review of the service. But the proxy service abruptly closed up shop just one week later, saying a malicious hacker had destroyed all of the company’s customer and payment records. In July 2024, The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned the alleged creators of 911S5, and the U.S. Department of Justice arrested the Chinese national named in my 2022 profile of the proxy service.

Kilmer said IPIDEA also operates a sister service called 922 Proxy, which the company has pitched from Day One as a seamless alternative to 911S5 Proxy.

“You cannot tell me they don’t want the 911 customers by calling it that,” Kilmer said.

Among the recipients of Synthient’s notification was the proxy giant Oxylabs. Brundage shared an email he received from Oxylabs’ security team on December 31, which acknowledged Oxylabs had started rolling out security modifications to address the vulnerabilities described in Synthient’s report.

Reached for comment, Oxylabs confirmed they “have implemented changes that now eliminate the ability to bypass the blocklist and forward requests to private network addresses using a controlled domain.” But it said there is no evidence that Kimwolf or other other attackers exploited its network.

“In parallel, we reviewed the domains identified in the reported exploitation activity and did not observe traffic associated with them,” the Oxylabs statement continued. “Based on this review, there is no indication that our residential network was impacted by these activities.”

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Consider the following scenario, in which the mere act of allowing someone to use your Wi-Fi network could lead to a Kimwolf botnet infection. In this example, a friend or family member comes to stay with you for a few days, and you grant them access to your Wi-Fi without knowing that their mobile phone is infected with an app that turns the device into a residential proxy node. At that point, your home’s public IP address will show up for rent at the website of some residential proxy provider.

Miscreants like those behind Kimwolf then use residential proxy services online to access that proxy node on your IP, tunnel back through it and into your local area network (LAN), and automatically scan the internal network for devices with Android Debug Bridge mode turned on.

By the time your guest has packed up their things, said their goodbyes and disconnected from your Wi-Fi, you now have two devices on your local network — a digital photo frame and an unsanctioned Android TV box — that are infected with Kimwolf. You may have never intended for these devices to be exposed to the larger Internet, and yet there you are.

Here’s another possible nightmare scenario: Attackers use their access to proxy networks to modify your Internet router’s settings so that it relies on malicious DNS servers controlled by the attackers — allowing them to control where your Web browser goes when it requests a website. Think that’s far-fetched? Recall the DNSChanger malware from 2012 that infected more than a half-million routers with search-hijacking malware, and ultimately spawned an entire security industry working group focused on containing and eradicating it.

XLAB

Much of what is published so far on Kimwolf has come from the Chinese security firm XLab, which was the first to chronicle the rise of the Aisuru botnet in late 2024. In its latest blog post, XLab said it began tracking Kimwolf on October 24, when the botnet’s control servers were swamping Cloudflare’s DNS servers with lookups for the distinctive domain 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132[.]su.

This domain and others connected to early Kimwolf variants spent several weeks topping Cloudflare’s chart of the Internet’s most sought-after domains, edging out Google.com and Apple.com of their rightful spots in the top 5 most-requested domains. That’s because during that time Kimwolf was asking its millions of bots to check in frequently using Cloudflare’s DNS servers.

It is clear from reading the XLab report that KrebsOnSecurity (and security experts) probably erred in misattributing some of Kimwolf’s early activities to the Aisuru botnet, which appears to be operated by a different group entirely. IPDEA may have been truthful when it said it had no affiliation with the Aisuru botnet, but Brundage’s data left no doubt that its proxy service clearly was being massively abused by Aisuru’s Android variant, Kimwolf.

XLab said Kimwolf has infected at least 1.8 million devices, and has shown it is able to rebuild itself quickly from scratch.

“Analysis indicates that Kimwolf’s primary infection targets are TV boxes deployed in residential network environments,” XLab researchers wrote. “Since residential networks usually adopt dynamic IP allocation mechanisms, the public IPs of devices change over time, so the true scale of infected devices cannot be accurately measured solely by the quantity of IPs. In other words, the cumulative observation of 2.7 million IP addresses does not equate to 2.7 million infected devices.”

XLab said measuring Kimwolf’s size also is difficult because infected devices are distributed across multiple global time zones. “Affected by time zone differences and usage habits (e.g., turning off devices at night, not using TV boxes during holidays, etc.), these devices are not online simultaneously, further increasing the difficulty of comprehensive observation through a single time window,” the blog post observed.

XLab noted that the Kimwolf author shows an almost ‘obsessive’ fixation” on Yours Truly, apparently leaving “easter eggs” related to my name in multiple places through the botnet’s code and communications:

ANALYSIS AND ADVICE

One frustrating aspect of threats like Kimwolf is that in most cases it is not easy for the average user to determine if there are any devices on their internal network which may be vulnerable to threats like Kimwolf and/or already infected with residential proxy malware.

Let’s assume that through years of security training or some dark magic you can successfully identify that residential proxy activity on your internal network was linked to a specific mobile device inside your house: From there, you’d still need to isolate and remove the app or unwanted component that is turning the device into a residential proxy.

Also, the tooling and knowledge needed to achieve this kind of visibility just isn’t there from an average consumer standpoint. The work that it takes to configure your network so you can see and interpret logs of all traffic coming in and out is largely beyond the skillset of most Internet users (and, I’d wager, many security experts). But it’s a topic worth exploring in an upcoming story.

Happily, Synthient has erected a page on its website that will state whether a visitor’s public Internet address was seen among those of Kimwolf-infected systems. Brundage also has compiled a list of the unofficial Android TV boxes that are most highly represented in the Kimwolf botnet.

If you own a TV box that matches one of these model names and/or numbers, please just rip it out of your network. If you encounter one of these devices on the network of a family member or friend, send them a link to this story and explain that it’s not worth the potential hassle and harm created by keeping them plugged in.

Chad Seaman is a principal security researcher with Akamai Technologies. Seaman said he wants more consumers to be wary of these pseudo Android TV boxes to the point where they avoid them altogether.

“I want the consumer to be paranoid of these crappy devices and of these residential proxy schemes,” he said. “We need to highlight why they’re dangerous to everyone and to the individual. The whole security model where people think their LAN (Local Internal Network) is safe, that there aren’t any bad guys on the LAN so it can’t be that dangerous is just really outdated now.”

“The idea that an app can enable this type of abuse on my network and other networks, that should really give you pause,” about which devices to allow onto your local network, Seaman said. “And it’s not just Android devices here. Some of these proxy services have SDKs for Mac and Windows, and the iPhone. It could be running something that inadvertently cracks open your network and lets countless random people inside.”

In July 2025, Google filed a “John Doe” lawsuit (PDF) against 25 unidentified defendants collectively dubbed the “BadBox 2.0 Enterprise,” which Google described as a botnet of over ten million unsanctioned Android streaming devices engaged in advertising fraud. Google said the BADBOX 2.0 botnet, in addition to compromising multiple types of devices prior to purchase, also can infect devices by requiring the download of malicious apps from unofficial marketplaces.

Google’s lawsuit came on the heels of a June 2025 advisory from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which warned that cyber criminals were gaining unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the products with malware prior to the user’s purchase, or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors — usually during the set-up process.

The FBI said BADBOX 2.0 was discovered after the original BADBOX campaign was disrupted in 2024. The original BADBOX was identified in 2023, and primarily consisted of Android operating system devices that were compromised with backdoor malware prior to purchase.

Lindsay Kaye is vice president of threat intelligence at HUMAN Security, a company that worked closely on the BADBOX investigations. Kaye said the BADBOX botnets and the residential proxy networks that rode on top of compromised devices were detected because they enabled a ridiculous amount of advertising fraud, as well as ticket scalping, retail fraud, account takeovers and content scraping.

Kaye said consumers should stick to known brands when it comes to purchasing things that require a wired or wireless connection.

“If people are asking what they can do to avoid being victimized by proxies, it’s safest to stick with name brands,” Kaye said. “Anything promising something for free or low-cost, or giving you something for nothing just isn’t worth it. And be careful about what apps you allow on your phone.”

Many wireless routers these days make it relatively easy to deploy a “Guest” wireless network on-the-fly. Doing so allows your guests to browse the Internet just fine but it blocks their device from being able to talk to other devices on the local network — such as shared folders, printers and drives. If someone — a friend, family member, or contractor — requests access to your network, give them the guest Wi-Fi network credentials if you have that option.

There is a small but vocal pro-piracy camp that is almost condescendingly dismissive of the security threats posed by these unsanctioned Android TV boxes. These tech purists positively chafe at the idea of people wholesale discarding one of these TV boxes. A common refrain from this camp is that Internet-connected devices are not inherently bad or good, and that even factory-infected boxes can be flashed with new firmware or custom ROMs that contain no known dodgy software.

However, it’s important to point out that the majority of people buying these devices are not security or hardware experts; the devices are sought out because they dangle something of value for “free.” Most buyers have no idea of the bargain they’re making when plugging one of these dodgy TV boxes into their network.

It is somewhat remarkable that we haven’t yet seen the entertainment industry applying more visible pressure on the major e-commerce vendors to stop peddling this insecure and actively malicious hardware that is largely made and marketed for video piracy. These TV boxes are a public nuisance for bundling malicious software while having no apparent security or authentication built-in, and these two qualities make them an attractive nuisance for cybercriminals.

Stay tuned for Part II in this series, which will poke through clues left behind by the people who appear to have built Kimwolf and benefited from it the most.

Aisuru, the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and sustainable business: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services that help cybercriminals anonymize their traffic. Experts say a glut of proxies from Aisuru and other sources is fueling large-scale data harvesting efforts tied to various artificial intelligence (AI) projects, helping content scrapers evade detection by routing their traffic through residential connections that appear to be regular Internet users.

First identified in August 2024, Aisuru has spread to at least 700,000 IoT systems, such as poorly secured Internet routers and security cameras. Aisuru’s overlords have used their massive botnet to clobber targets with headline-grabbing DDoS attacks, flooding targeted hosts with blasts of junk requests from all infected systems simultaneously.

In June, Aisuru hit KrebsOnSecurity.com with a DDoS clocking at 6.3 terabits per second — the biggest attack that Google had ever mitigated at the time. In the weeks and months that followed, Aisuru’s operators demonstrated DDoS capabilities of nearly 30 terabits of data per second — well beyond the attack mitigation capabilities of most Internet destinations.

These digital sieges have been particularly disruptive this year for U.S.-based Internet service providers (ISPs), in part because Aisuru recently succeeded in taking over a large number of IoT devices in the United States. And when Aisuru launches attacks, the volume of outgoing traffic from infected systems on these ISPs is often so high that it can disrupt or degrade Internet service for adjacent (non-botted) customers of the ISPs.

“Multiple broadband access network operators have experienced significant operational impact due to outbound DDoS attacks in excess of 1.5Tb/sec launched from Aisuru botnet nodes residing on end-customer premises,” wrote Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at Netscout, in a recent executive summary on Aisuru. “Outbound/crossbound attack traffic exceeding 1Tb/sec from compromised customer premise equipment (CPE) devices has caused significant disruption to wireline and wireless broadband access networks. High-throughput attacks have caused chassis-based router line card failures.”

The incessant attacks from Aisuru have caught the attention of federal authorities in the United States and Europe (many of Aisuru’s victims are customers of ISPs and hosting providers based in Europe). Quite recently, some of the world’s largest ISPs have started informally sharing block lists identifying the rapidly shifting locations of the servers that the attackers use to control the activities of the botnet.

Experts say the Aisuru botmasters recently updated their malware so that compromised devices can more easily be rented to so-called “residential proxy” providers. These proxy services allow paying customers to route their Internet communications through someone else’s device, providing anonymity and the ability to appear as a regular Internet user in almost any major city worldwide.

From a website’s perspective, the IP traffic of a residential proxy network user appears to originate from the rented residential IP address, not from the proxy service customer. Proxy services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence. But they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity (think advertising fraud, credential stuffing) because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

And as we’ll see in a moment, this entire shadowy industry appears to be shifting its focus toward enabling aggressive content scraping activity that continuously feeds raw data into large language models (LLMs) built to support various AI projects.

‘INSANE’ GROWTH

Riley Kilmer is co-founder of spur.us, a service that tracks proxy networks. Kilmer said all of the top proxy services have grown substantially over the past six months.

“I just checked, and in the last 90 days we’ve seen 250 million unique residential proxy IPs,” Kilmer said. “That is insane. That is so high of a number, it’s unheard of. These proxies are absolutely everywhere now.”

Today, Spur says it is tracking an unprecedented spike in available proxies across all providers, including;

LUMINATI_PROXY    11,856,421
NETNUT_PROXY    10,982,458
ABCPROXY_PROXY    9,294,419
OXYLABS_PROXY     6,754,790
IPIDEA_PROXY     3,209,313
EARNFM_PROXY    2,659,913
NODEMAVEN_PROXY    2,627,851
INFATICA_PROXY    2,335,194
IPROYAL_PROXY    2,032,027
YILU_PROXY    1,549,155

Reached for comment about the apparent rapid growth in their proxy network, Oxylabs (#4 on Spur’s list) said while their proxy pool did grow recently, it did so at nowhere near the rate cited by Spur.

“We don’t systematically track other providers’ figures, and we’re not aware of any instances of 10× or 100× growth, especially when it comes to a few bigger companies that are legitimate businesses,” the company said in a written statement.

Bright Data was formerly known as Luminati Networks, the name that is currently at the top of Spur’s list of the biggest residential proxy networks. Bright Data likewise told KrebsOnSecurity that Spur’s current estimates of its proxy network are dramatically overstated and inaccurate.

“We did not actively initiate nor do we see any 10x or 100x expansion of our network, which leads me to believe that someone might be presenting these IPs as Bright Data’s in some way,” said Rony Shalit, Bright Data’s chief compliance and ethics officer. “In many cases in the past, due to us being the leading data collection proxy provider, IPs were falsely tagged as being part of our network, or while being used by other proxy providers for malicious activity.”

“Our network is only sourced from verified IP providers and a robust opt-in only residential peers, which we work hard and in complete transparency to obtain,” Shalit continued. “Every DC, ISP or SDK partner is reviewed and approved, and every residential peer must actively opt in to be part of our network.”

HK NETWORK

Even Spur acknowledges that Luminati and Oxylabs are unlike most other proxy services on their top proxy providers list, in that these providers actually adhere to “know-your-customer” policies, such as requiring video calls with all customers, and strictly blocking customers from reselling access.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that helps companies detect proxy networks. Brundage said if there is increasing confusion around which proxy networks are the most worrisome, it’s because nearly all of these lesser-known proxy services have evolved into highly incestuous bandwidth resellers. What’s more, he said, some proxy providers do not appreciate being tracked and have been known to take aggressive steps to confuse systems that scan the Internet for residential proxy nodes.

Brundage said most proxy services today have created their own software development kit or SDK that other app developers can bundle with their code to earn revenue. These SDKs quietly modify the user’s device so that some portion of their bandwidth can be used to forward traffic from proxy service customers.

“Proxy providers have pools of constantly churning IP addresses,” he said. “These IP addresses are sourced through various means, such as bandwidth-sharing apps, botnets, Android SDKs, and more. These providers will often either directly approach resellers or offer a reseller program that allows users to resell bandwidth through their platform.”

Many SDK providers say they require full consent before allowing their software to be installed on end-user devices. Still, those opt-in agreements and consent checkboxes may be little more than a formality for cybercriminals like the Aisuru botmasters, who can earn a commission each time one of their infected devices is forced to install some SDK that enables one or more of these proxy services.

Depending on its structure, a single provider may operate hundreds of different proxy pools at a time — all maintained through other means, Brundage said.

“Often, you’ll see resellers maintaining their own proxy pool in addition to an upstream provider,” he said. “It allows them to market a proxy pool to high-value clients and offer an unlimited bandwidth plan for cheap reduce their own costs.”

Some proxy providers appear to be directly in league with botmasters. Brundage identified one proxy seller that was aggressively advertising cheap and plentiful bandwidth to content scraping companies. After scanning that provider’s pool of available proxies, Brundage said he found a one-to-one match with IP addresses he’d previously mapped to the Aisuru botnet.

Brundage says that by almost any measurement, the world’s largest residential proxy service is IPidea, a China-based proxy network. IPidea is #5 on Spur’s Top 10, and Brundage said its brands include ABCProxy (#3), Roxlabs, LunaProxy, PIA S5 Proxy, PyProxy, 922Proxy, 360Proxy, IP2World, and Cherry Proxy. Spur’s Kilmer said they also track Yilu Proxy (#10) as IPidea.

Brundage said all of these providers operate under a corporate umbrella known on the cybercrime forums as “HK Network.”

“The way it works is there’s this whole reseller ecosystem, where IPidea will be incredibly aggressive and approach all these proxy providers with the offer, ‘Hey, if you guys buy bandwidth from us, we’ll give you these amazing reseller prices,'” Brundage explained. “But they’re also very aggressive in recruiting resellers for their apps.”

Those apps include a range of low-cost and “free” virtual private networking (VPN) services that indeed allow users to enjoy a free VPN, but which also turn the user’s device into a traffic relay that can be rented to cybercriminals, or else parceled out to countless other proxy networks.

“They have all this bandwidth to offload,” Brundage said of IPidea and its sister networks. “And they can do it through their own platforms, or they go get resellers to do it for them by advertising on sketchy hacker forums to reach more people.”

One of IPidea’s core brands is 922S5Proxy, which is a not-so-subtle nod to the 911S5Proxy service that was hugely popular between 2015 and 2022. In July 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into 911S5Proxy’s origins and apparent owners in China. Less than a week later, 911S5Proxy announced it was closing down after the company’s servers were massively hacked.

That 2022 story named Yunhe Wang from Beijing as the apparent owner and/or manager of the 911S5 proxy service. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice arrested Mr Wang, alleging that his network was used to steal billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers, and federal lending programs. At the same time, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against Wang and two other Chinese nationals for operating 911S5Proxy.

DATA SCRAPING FOR AI

In recent months, multiple experts who track botnet and proxy activity have shared that a great deal of content scraping which ultimately benefits AI companies is now leveraging these proxy networks to further obfuscate their aggressive data-slurping activity. That’s because by routing it through residential IP addresses, content scraping firms can make their traffic far trickier to filter out.

“It’s really difficult to block, because there’s a risk of blocking real people,” Spur’s Kilmer said of the LLM scraping activity that is fed through individual residential IP addresses, which are often shared by multiple customers at once.

Kilmer says the AI industry has brought a veneer of legitimacy to residential proxy business, which has heretofore mostly been associated with sketchy affiliate money making programs, automated abuse, and unwanted Internet traffic.

“Web crawling and scraping has always been a thing, but AI made it like a commodity, data that had to be collected,” Kilmer said. “Everybody wanted to monetize their own data pots, and how they monetize that is different across the board.”

Kilmer said many LLM-related scrapers rely on residential proxies in cases where the content provider has restricted access to their platform in some way, such as forcing interaction through an app, or keeping all content behind a login page with multi-factor authentication.

“Where the cost of data is out of reach — there is some exclusivity or reason they can’t access the data — they’ll turn to residential proxies so they look like a real person accessing that data,” Kilmer said of the content scraping efforts.

Aggressive AI crawlers increasingly are overloading community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent DDoS attacks on vital public resources. A report earlier this year from LibreNews found some open-source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI company bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. The company’s “pay-per-crawl” feature is currently in a private beta, and it lets publishers set their own prices that bots must pay before scraping content.

On October 22, the social media and news network Reddit sued Oxylabs (PDF) and several other proxy providers, alleging that their systems enabled the mass-scraping of Reddit user content even though Reddit had taken steps to block such activity.

“Recognizing that Reddit denies scrapers like them access to its site, Defendants scrape the data from Google’s search results instead,” the lawsuit alleges. “They do so by masking their identities, hiding their locations, and disguising their web scrapers as regular people (among other techniques) to circumvent or bypass the security restrictions meant to stop them.”

Denas Grybauskas, chief governance and strategy officer at Oxylabs, said the company was shocked and disappointed by the lawsuit.

“Reddit has made no attempt to speak with us directly or communicate any potential concerns,” Grybauskas said in a written statement. “Oxylabs has always been and will continue to be a pioneer and an industry leader in public data collection, and it will not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations. Oxylabs’ position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them. It is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.”

As big and powerful as Aisuru may be, it is hardly the only botnet that is contributing to the overall broad availability of residential proxies. For example, on June 5 the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center warned that an IoT malware threat dubbed BADBOX 2.0 had compromised millions of smart-TV boxes, digital projectors, vehicle infotainment units, picture frames, and other IoT devices.

In July, Google filed a lawsuit in New York federal court against the Badbox botnet’s alleged perpetrators. Google said the Badbox 2.0 botnet “compromised more than 10 million uncertified devices running Android’s open-source software, which lacks Google’s security protections. Cybercriminals infected these devices with pre-installed malware and exploited them to conduct large-scale ad fraud and other digital crimes.”

A FAMILIAR DOMAIN NAME

Brundage said the Aisuru botmasters have their own SDK, and for some reason part of its code tells many newly-infected systems to query the domain name fuckbriankrebs[.]com. This may be little more than an elaborate “screw you” to this site’s author: One of the botnet’s alleged partners goes by the handle “Forky,” and was identified in June by KrebsOnSecurity as a young man from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Brundage noted that only systems infected with Aisuru’s Android SDK will be forced to resolve the domain. Initially, there was some discussion about whether the domain might have some utility as a “kill switch” capable of disrupting the botnet’s operations, although Brundage and others interviewed for this story say that is unlikely.

For one thing, they said, if the domain was somehow critical to the operation of the botnet, why was it still unregistered and actively for-sale? Why indeed, we asked. Happily, the domain name was deftly snatched up last week by Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” for the security intelligence company Seralys.

Caturegli enabled a passive DNS server on that domain and within a few hours received more than 700,000 requests for unique subdomains on fuckbriankrebs[.]com.

But even with that visibility into Aisuru, it is difficult to use this domain check-in feature to measure its true size, Brundage said. After all, he said, the systems that are phoning home to the domain are only a small portion of the overall botnet.

“The bots are hardcoded to just spam lookups on the subdomains,” he said. “So anytime an infection occurs or it runs in the background, it will do one of those DNS queries.”

The domain fuckbriankrebs[.]com has a storied history. On its initial launch in 2009, it was used to spread malicious software by the Cutwail spam botnet. In 2011, the domain was involved in a notable DDoS against this website from a botnet powered by Russkill (a.k.a. “Dirt Jumper”).

Domaintools.com finds that in 2015, fuckbriankrebs[.]com was registered to an email address attributed to David “Abdilo” Crees, a 27-year-old Australian man sentenced in May 2025 to time served for cybercrime convictions related to the Lizard Squad hacking group.

Update, Nov. 1, 2025, 10:25 a.m. ET: An earlier version of this story erroneously cited Spur’s proxy numbers from earlier this year; Spur said those numbers conflated residential proxies — which are rotating and attached to real end-user devices — with “ISP proxies” located at AT&T. ISP proxies, Spur said, involve tricking an ISP into routing a large number of IP addresses that are resold as far more static datacenter proxies.