Millions of phones, computers and smart-home gadgets were quietly working for criminals, and their owners had no clue. Then Dutch police pulled the plug. Last week they took down a botnet, a hidden network of hacked devices that one group controls from afar. This one was huge. It tied together at least 17 million machines around the world, all run through servers in the Netherlands.
How police shut it down
The takedown came down to the servers that ran the whole thing. Police and the country's cyber agency went after 200 of them in the Netherlands. They seized several machines from a hosting company so they could dig into the case. The hosting company then cut the botnet off, saying it was being used for crime. The whole thing started with a tip. A security researcher spotted the network and reported it.
Hacked devices included plain everyday gear, from computers and tablets to phones and internet-connected gadgets. Here is how a device gets pulled in. An attacker finds a way past its defenses, then sneaks in a harmful program. After that the attacker can control the machine from anywhere. Your gadget becomes one more relay, passing along internet traffic for whoever is paying. You would never notice.
Officials did not say which service ran the botnet. But Dutch outlet NL Times reported it was a company called Asocks. Asocks sells what are known as residential proxies. A proxy sends your internet traffic through someone else's home device, so it looks like normal browsing from a real house. That has honest uses, like watching shows blocked in your country. But it also hides bad behavior. Crooks use it to attack websites, run scams and scrape huge amounts of data.
Security firm HUMAN Security says Asocks is based in Russia and gets sold to criminals on hacker forums. Back in March 2024, HUMAN linked it to a batch of fake Android apps. The apps pretended to be free VPNs. Anyone who installed one quietly handed over their phone to the proxy network. Asocks also sells access in the open, for roughly $5 to $15 a month.
How to protect your devices
Devices get roped in through hidden programs, without the owner ever agreeing. This kind of network is hard to catch from the outside, because nothing looks wrong on your screen. A few simple habits keep you off the list. Keep your software up to date. Change the default password on anything new. Turn on two-step login when you can. Only install apps from places you trust.
Your router matters too, since it sits between your home and the wider internet. Lock your Wi-Fi with WPA2 or WPA3. Those are the standard ways to scramble your home network so outsiders cannot read it.
NCSC on the botnet takedown, The Hacker News on the Dutch botnet
