The US Department of Justice has recently reported that the FBI was successful in eliminating the Qakbot botnet which had taken control of over 700,000 computers globally.
Evidently, this botnet had been used by ransomware groups such as Conti, ProLock, Egregor, REvil, MegaCortex, and Black Basta, resulting in the malware operators receiving approximately $58 million from victims in ransom payments between October 2021 and April 2023.
During the investigation, law enforcement seized more than $8.6 million worth of bitcoins as well.
The majority of victims were initially infected through malicious phishing emails, and later used by operators to install ransomware onto their computers.
The FBI was able to access the malware’s infrastructure and take control, thereby disabling it.
This follows the announcement the US Department of Justice made in May, where they had detailed the successful dismantlement of the P2P botnet Snake, which had been used by the Russian FSB and was circulated by the Turla hacker group.
