In the United States district court in New York, Google filed a suit against the alleged creators of the Glupteba botnet, which infected more than a million Windows-based computers. сообщает TechCrunch.
The company believes that the software developers are Russians Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov, citing data from their Gmail and Google Workspace accounts. The suit also mentions 15 unnamed individuals.
Experts tracked the Glupteba botnet since 2020. It steals Google user accounts, covertly mines cryptocurrency, and configures proxies to redirect traffic.
Most computers were infected via downloads of free software from websites. The number of victims is growing by thousands daily.
The network runs on a blockchain to guard against outages, and it cannot be fully neutralized due to “technical complexity”. When one of the Glupteba command-and-control servers goes offline, the botnet scans the distributed network to locate a new domain address.
“At any moment, the power of the Glupteba botnet could be deployed in a large-scale DDoS attack or for ransomware operations,” according to Google’s complaint.
The company demands that the developers compensate for the damage from breaches and permanently cease using Google services.
Earlier in November, the Cybersecurity Action Team found that the primary objective of hacking accounts on the Google Cloud platform was their further use for mining.
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