This is reported by Ukrinform with reference to the European Agency (Eurojust), which cooperates with the judiciary and police bodies of EU member states.

“During the large-scale international operation by law enforcement agencies of the USA, Germany, France, Netherlands, UK, Romania and Latvia, the infrastructure of the malware and botnet known as Qakbot was destroyed.” The statement said:

It was noted that the elimination of the Qakbot infrastructure is another decisive achievement in the fight against cybercrime.

Qakbot is considered one of the most malicious programs in the world. In particular, last year criminals controlled a botnet that covered more than 700,000 computer systems. Computers were infected, for example, through malicious email attachments. The data on the computer was transmitted to the attackers.

Qakbot has been used by cybercriminals for ransomware, financial fraud, and other malware, including other criminal activities.

Damages are estimated to be several hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

According to the investigation, Qakbot (also known as Qbot and Pinkslipbot) was controlled by a criminal network and used by other criminals to attack critical industries worldwide. Qakbot malware infects victims’ computers mostly through spam email messages containing malicious attachments or hyperlinks.

Eurojust and Europol supported the investigation and played a key role in facilitating cross-border cooperation.

As Ukrinform reported, the US Department of Justice, together with law enforcement partners from Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain, destroyed the infrastructure of the Russian botnet RSOCKS, which has hacked millions of computers around the world.