{"id":54290,"date":"2021-12-08T09:53:01","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T07:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=54290"},"modified":"2025-09-03T19:43:56","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:43:56","slug":"google-accuses-two-russians-of-building-a-botnet-for-covert-cryptocurrency-mining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/google-accuses-two-russians-of-building-a-botnet-for-covert-cryptocurrency-mining\/","title":{"rendered":"Google accuses two Russians of building a botnet for covert cryptocurrency mining"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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. <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2021\/12\/07\/google-disrupts-russian-botnet-that-infected-1-million-windows-machines\/\">\u0441\u043e\u043e\u0431\u0449\u0430\u0435\u0442<\/a> TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Experts tracked the Glupteba botnet since 2020. It steals Google user accounts, covertly mines cryptocurrency, and configures proxies to redirect traffic.<\/p>\n<p>Most computers were infected via downloads of free software from websites. The number of victims is growing by thousands daily.<\/p>\n<p>The network runs on a blockchain to guard against outages, and it cannot be fully neutralized due to \u201ctechnical complexity\u201d. When one of the Glupteba command-and-control servers goes offline, the botnet scans the distributed network to locate a new domain address.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>&#8220;At any moment, the power of the Glupteba botnet could be deployed in a large-scale DDoS attack or for ransomware operations,&#8221; according to Google&#8217;s complaint.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The company demands that the developers compensate for the damage from breaches and permanently cease using Google services.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier in November, the Cybersecurity Action Team found that the primary objective of hacking accounts on the Google Cloud platform was their <a href=\"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/news\/86-of-compromised-google-cloud-accounts-were-used-for-mining\">further use for mining<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Follow ForkLog&#8217;s bitcoin news on our <a href=\"https:\/\/telegram.me\/forklog\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Telegram<\/a> \u2014 cryptocurrency news, prices and analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"1","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1573,1162,1154,738],"class_list":["post-54290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-botnet","tag-court-cases","tag-crimes","tag-google"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"15","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"1","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54290"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54292,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54290\/revisions\/54292"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}