Authorities in the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised more than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center.
The action, announced Thursday, came about after a security researcher reported the sprawling network to authorities. The host infrastructure was located in the Netherlands.
Used for criminal purposes
“The police then seized several botnet servers from a hosting provider for investigation,” the NCSC said. “The botnet was taken offline by the provider because it was used for criminal purposes.”
This article was originally published by Ars Technica and written by Dan Goodin .
Read original article on Ars Technica