botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google on Wednesday announced that it worked together with other partners to disrupt IPIDEA, which it described as one of the largest residential proxy networks in the world. To that end, the company said it took legal action to take down dozens of domains used to control devices and proxy traffic through them. As of writing, IPIDEA's website ("www.ipidea.io") is no longer accessible. It advertised itself as the "world's leading provider of IP proxy" with more than 6.1 million daily updated IP addresses and 69,000 daily new IP addresses. "Residential proxy networks have become a pervasive tool for everything from high-end espionage to massive criminal schemes," John Hultquist, Google Threat Intelligence Group's (GTIG) chief analyst, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "By routing traffic through a person's home internet connection, attackers can hide in plain sight while infiltrating corporate environments. By taking do...

The Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies said it null-routed traffic to more than 550 command-and-control (C2) nodes associated with the AISURU/Kimwolf botnet since early October 2025. AISURU and its Android counterpart, Kimwolf, have emerged as some of the biggest botnets in recent times, capable of directing enslaved devices to participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and relay malicious traffic for residential proxy services . Details about Kimwolf emerged last month when QiAnXin XLab published an exhaustive analysis of the malware, which turns compromised devices – mostly unsanctioned Android TV streaming devices – into a residential proxy by delivering a software development kit (SDK) called ByteConnect either directly or through sketchy apps that come pre-installed on them. The net result is that the botnet has expanded to infect more than 2 million Android devices with an exposed Android Debug Bridge (ADB) service by tunneling through residentia...

A new wave of GoBruteforcer attacks has targeted databases of cryptocurrency and blockchain projects to co-opt them into a botnet that's capable of brute-forcing user passwords for services such as FTP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and phpMyAdmin on Linux servers. "The current wave of campaigns is driven by two factors: the mass reuse of AI-generated server deployment examples that propagate common usernames and weak defaults, and the persistence of legacy web stacks such as XAMPP that expose FTP and admin interfaces with minimal hardening," Check Point Research said in an analysis published last week. GoBruteforcer, also called GoBrut, was first documented by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in March 2023, documenting its ability to target Unix-like platforms running x86, x64, and ARM architectures to deploy an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot and a web shell for remote access, along with fetching a brute-force module to scan for vulnerable systems and expand the botnet's reach. ...

The botnet known as Kimwolf has infected more than 2 million Android devices by tunneling through residential proxy networks, according to findings from Synthient. "Key actors involved in the Kimwolf botnet are observed monetizing the botnet through app installs, selling residential proxy bandwidth, and selling its DDoS functionality," the company said in an analysis published last week. Kimwolf was first publicly documented by QiAnXin XLab last month, while documenting its connections to another botnet known as AISURU. Active since at least August 2025, Kimwolf is assessed to be an Android variant of AISURU. There is growing evidence to suggest that the botnet is actually behind a series of record-setting DDoS attacks late last year. The malware turns infected systems into conduits for relaying malicious traffic and orchestrating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks at scale. The vast majority of the infections are concentrated in Vietnam, Brazil, India, and ...

The year opened without a reset. The same pressure carried over, and in some places it tightened. Systems people assume are boring or stable are showing up in the wrong places. Attacks moved quietly, reused familiar paths, and kept working longer than anyone wants to admit. This week's stories share one pattern. Nothing flashy. No single moment. Just steady abuse of trust — updates, extensions, logins, messages — the things people click without thinking. That's where damage starts now. This recap pulls those signals together. Not to overwhelm, but to show where attention slipped and why it matters early in the year. ⚡ Threat of the Week RondoDox Botnet Exploits React2Shell Flaw — A persistent nine-month-long campaign has targeted Internet of Things (IoT) devices and web applications to enroll them into a botnet known as RondoDox. As of December 2025, the activity has been observed leveraging the recently disclosed React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182, CVSS score: 10.0) flaw as an initial...