Malware

Canadian authorities arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man alleged to be 'Dort,' the operator of Kimwolf, a fast-spreading IoT botnet responsible for large-scale DDoS attacks over the past six months. The suspect also allegedly conducted doxing and swatting campaigns against a journalist and a security researcher, and now faces criminal charges in both the U.S. and Canada. While the operator's arrest may disrupt operations, the underlying botnet infrastructure and malware may persist or be repurposed by other actors.

Updated Jul 7, 2026

A joint law enforcement and industry operation involving Google disrupted NetNut, a residential proxy network built on approximately 2 million compromised Android devices, including smart TVs and streaming boxes. The infrastructure allowed threat actors and paying customers to route traffic through unwitting victims' devices, enabling anonymized malicious activity such as credential stuffing, ad fraud, and scraping. The takedown cuts off access to this proxy pool but does not necessarily remediate infections on affected devices.

Updated Jul 5, 2026

The FBI, working with industry partners, seized hundreds of domains linked to NetNut, a residential proxy service operated by publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies. The takedown follows security research connecting NetNut to the Popa botnet, a network of at least two million devices compromised without meaningful user consent. This represents a significant disruption to a large-scale proxyware/botnet infrastructure used to monetize unwitting victims' internet connections.

Updated Jul 4, 2026

The Popa botnet is a large-scale Android-based malware network that has compromised millions of consumer TV boxes over the past four years, using them as unwitting relays for internet traffic. Security researchers have linked this infrastructure to NetNut, a residential proxy service operated by publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies Ltd (NASDAQ: ALAR), raising concerns about corporate involvement in facilitating malicious traffic relay networks.

Updated Jul 4, 2026