US, allies warn of industrialized Chinese botnets

Hacked routers and Internet of Things devices around the world were noted by the U.S., the UK, and eight other countries to have been tapped by multiple Chinese state-backed threat operations to form botnets that enable data theft intrusions and disruptive cyberattacks, reports The Register.

Volt Typhoon, which was reported to have infiltrated U.S. networks, has primarily targeted outdated Cisco and Netgear routers to be part of its KV Botnet, according to a joint advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, and over a dozen other agencies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Moreover, Chinese information security firms, including the Integrity Technology Group previously linked to Flax Typhoon, were said to have established and maintain some of the industrialized covert networks. Such a development follows the successful global takedown of the SocksEscort proxy service, which had impacted hundreds of thousands of residential routers.