The FBI announced it, working with European law enforcement agencies, have broken up a network of more than 700,000 computers that had been compromised by hackers to undertake denial-of-service and to insert ransomware into businesses’ systems, CNN reports.
The effort targeted a Russian-developed ransomware known as Qakbot that various groups have used to shut down healthcare and banking systems in the US and Western countries. FBI programs were able to redirect the target of the attack to self-contained systems controlled by the FBI. Good-guy developers were then able to turn the code on itself, ultimately shooting back code to the infected computers to delete the malicious code.
In the course of the investigation, the FBI and its partners were able to remove the virus from 200,000 computers in the US and another 500,000 around the world. In addition, the FBI was able to confiscate more than $8 million in cryptocurrency from the hackers.