The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed that it has disrupted the Russian RSocks malware botnet. This malware was used to hijack millions of the computers, smartphones and IoT (Internet of Things) devices worldwide. Consequently, it was used as a proxy servers which is now been shut down by U.S.
Consequently, by the investigation, it was revealed that several large public and private entities have been victims of the RSocks botnet. The victims also included a university, a hotel, a television studio, businesses and many others. However, no arrests have been announced till now.
A botnet is a surge of devices that hackers can remotely control to perform DDoS attacks, crypto mining and deploying malware. However in RSocks, the botnet was used to transform the residential computers into proxy servers. Consequently, this allowed the botnet users to use them for malicious activities.
Hence, using a proxy service makes it difficult for the malwares to be tracked by law enforcement, especially when the IP addresses belong to the user who are unaware that their devices were hijacked.
