China-backed spies are said to have taken down their own 260,000-device botnet after the FBI and its international buddies went after them.
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The botnet was controlled by the somewhat misnamed Integrity Technology Group, a Chinese company whose chairman has admitted that his company has for years "gathered intelligence and conducted reconnaissance for Chinese state security agencies," FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the Aspen Digital computer security conference. on Wednesday. The Internet-connected bots consisted of computers, servers, and Internet-of-Things gadgets infected with remote malware, and more than half of them were located in the United States.
A Beijing-run crew called Flax Typhoon had been building the Mirai-based botnet since 2021 and was accused of spying on Taiwanese networks by Microsoft in 2023, although that claim is disputed.
Wray said Flax recently took aim at US critical infrastructure, government and academia. The FBI's Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) was called in along with the NSA.
