The law enforcement action is one of the most significant operations against cybercriminal enterprises ever
Europol has announced the disruption of the Emotet botnet, one of the longest-lived and most pervasive malware threats, following a large-scale operation that also included a number of national law enforcement agencies across Europe and North America.
Authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine have banded together for the operation, which involved gaining control of the botnet’s infrastructure and taking it down “from the inside”, according to the European Union’s (EU) law enforcement agency.
“The infected machines of victims have been redirected towards this law enforcement-controlled infrastructure. This is a unique and new approach to effectively disrupt the activities of the facilitators of cybercrime,” as Europol put it. The agency coordinated the effort together with Eurojust, the EU’s judicial agency.
In all, some 700 command-and-control (C&C) servers were taken offline, according to the UK’s National Crime Agency. Emotet’s operators used the servers to commandeer the compromised computers, launch new malicious campaigns and enhance the resilience of their infrastructure, among other things.
Two out of the botnet’s three main servers were located in the Netherlands, said the Dutch police, which nicknamed the disruption “Operation LadyBird”. More than a million compromised sy ..
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