U.S. Authorities Disrupt Cyclops Blink Botnet

American law enforcers reported that they managed to disrupt the Cyclops Blink botnet, which they associate with the Russian hack group Sandworm (aka Telebots, BlackEnergy, Voodoo Bear). According to the authorities, the botnet was neutralized even before it was used in attacks.

Let me remind you that for the first time they started talking about Cyclops Blink in February 2022, when law enforcement officers from the US and the UK published a joint report detailing the new malware. They reported that Cyclops Blink was used as early as June 2019, and primarily attacked WatchGuard Firebox firewalls, although it had the ability to attack other types of network equipment. Soon it really became known that the malware was also attacking Asus routers.

Reports described Cyclops Blink as a “professional-designed” malware that uses a modular structure, allowing hackers to gain a foothold on devices and deploy second-stage payloads to infected devices. It was assumed that in this way hackers create an infrastructure for further attacks on targets important to them.

As the US Department of Justice now claims, last month, “a two-tier global botnet infrastructure of thousands of infected network devices” was destroyed with the active assistance of Watchguard developers.

Law enforcers claim to have destroyed malware on vulnerable WatchGuard devices that the Sandworm group used to control its botnet. Although the operation did not “clean up” thousands of other infected devices around the world, the Department of Justice assured that after the C&C mechanism was disabled, these bots were no longer under the control of Sandworm.

Law enforcement officials say they were forced to intervene as the number of devices in the Cyclops Blink botnet decreased by only 39% after the February recommendations of the authorities to fix problems. In response, the authorities enabled a covert operation to remove the malware, for which a federal warrant was obtained. As a result, FBI agents gained remote access to infected WatchGuard devices and fixed the problem themselves.

WatchGuard engineers have already prepared instructions on how to clean compromised Firebox devices from infection, restore them and update Fireware OS to the latest versions.

Summing up, the Ministry of Justice reported that the operation led to the successful recovery of thousands of compromised devices, although most of the hacked devices still remained infected.

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