Dutch cops wrest 17M devices from mystery botnet's clutches

Dutch police say they dismantled a large botnet this week comprising at least 17 million infected devices. After being tipped off by a researcher at the Netherlands' National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL), police began an investigation, which resulted in the discovery of 200 servers underpinning the botnet's infrastructure …

[Anonymous Coward]

Shout-out for mentioning Folding@home, what a cool project!

[Paul Herber]

I was awaiting a botnet that did the ironing for you!

[JWLong]

17 Million bots and 200 Servers.....................

Now, that's a network........................

[Andy The Hat]

"...avoid installing apps from unofficial sources, and keep software up to date."

So google, MS, github are all ok then? At least you could tell average Joe in less than several chapters of security spiel how to recognise an "official" source from an "unofficial" one ... isn't it easier to say probably "less dodgy" and "more dodgy"?

At least we have a massive multinational producing security patches for Win10 ... but refusing to release them to the majority of those 400M remaining users after October ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Down Turn? Realy?

Maybe there are less of them but the ones there are are big for a country of 19,000,000 meat bags.

Odido hack 6.2 million, Names, home addresses, phone numbers, customer numbers, dates of birth, and email addresses, Bank account numbers, passwords, driver's licenses, and ID cards

Basic-Fit hack 200,000 users

Chipsoft hack, Medical records, who knows what was stolen.

Bevolkingsonderzoek (Cancer Research) 500,000 volunteers, funnily enough the sorry letter was accompanied with a another letter asking if the volunteers would be interested in joining a new research project.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been seeing a bot net

attempting to access my webserver for the past few days.

For some reason they try to use login.cgi as the access point. I've not seen a webserver with that file in place (in the root of the server) for years.

Most of these attacks seem to originate from Africa or SE Asia.

The positive thing is that the site hold ZERO user data and absolutely NO financial information. There is only two users setup in WordPress and none are "Admin" or "Wordpress"

[An_Old_Dog]

Governmental Advice Promoting the Landfill Economy

avoid installing apps from unofficial sources

So don't install or use DD-WRT, OpenWRT, FreshTomato, etc., hmm?

keep software up to date

Manufacturers of SOHO-targetted routers ceasing to provide updates is a major reason for people installing "unofficial" firmware on their routers!