The Qakbot botnet has been crippled by the US Department of Justice (DOJ): 52 of its servers have been seized and the popular malware loader has been removed from over 700,000 victim computers around the world.
“To disrupt the botnet, the FBI was able to redirect Qakbot botnet traffic to and through servers controlled by the FBI, which in turn instructed infected computers in the United States and elsewhere to download a file created by law enforcement that would uninstall the Qakbot malware. This uninstaller was designed to untether the victim computer from the Qakbot botnet, preventing further installation of malware through Qakbot,” the Department explained.