The FBI and its partners in France, Germany, Romania, Latvia, the U.K. and the Netherlands dismantled a botnet infrastructure, dubbed Qakbot, that cybercriminals used to perform financial fraud, ransomware and various criminal activities.
“This botnet provided cybercriminals like these with a command-and-control infrastructure consisting of hundreds of thousands of computers used to carry out attacks against individuals and businesses all around the globe,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a video posted Tuesday.
Wray noted that victims of the botnet network included a medical device maker on the West Coast, a Midwest-based critical infrastructure government contractor and financial institutions on the East Coast.
According to the FBI, the Qakbot malware used spam emails containing malicious links to infect computers.
The bureau said it identified more than 700,000 compromised computers around the globe and disrupted the operation of the botnet by redirecting Qakbot traffic to FBI-operated servers that prompted the infected devices to download an uninstaller file, triggering the devices to remove the malware and disconnect from the botnet infrastructure.