FBI and Dutch police seize and shut down botnet of hacked routers

Two major services used by cybercriminals were just shut down as part of a joint international law enforcement operation called Operation Moonlander. The U.S. government, along with Dutch authorities, indicted four individuals accused of exploiting vulnerabilities in routers to create a botnet they sold under guise as legitimate proxy services for nearly $50 million. These services, Anyproxy and 5Socks, were targeted after it was revealed they built their networks using devices with known weaknesses, allowing cybercriminals to profit from bypassing censorship and accessing restricted content.