Moscow intelligence services’ malware called the Cyclops Blink malware was successfully disrupted by the US Department of Justice and FBI combined, according to ComputerWeekly.com.
The Department of Justice announced today that the FBI led the “court-authorized operation,” which brought about the breakdown of the Cyclops Blink malware.
The Cyclops Blink malware was announced to have targeted some victims, including the WatchGuard firewall and Asus router devices. The Cyclops Blink is a tool linked to the Russian intelligence services used for command and control (C2) infrastructure for an underlying botnet.
Sandworm malware targets firewalls at certain perimeters; it is thus declared dangerous. VPNFilter is a newly designed Sandworm malware that gives access to Sandworm to conduct malicious activities on all the machines sitting behind the firewall.
In the case of WatchGuard, the VPNFilter affected devices that were reconfigured from the factory settings. Unlike the previous attacks, only the devices with users’ preferences were affected.
According to Matthew Olsen, the assistant attorney general at the DoJ’s National Security Division, “the court-authorized removal of malware deployed by the Russian GRU demonstrates the department’s commitment to disrupt nation-state hacking using all of the legal tools at our disposal.”
He continued, “by working closely with WatchGuard and other government agencies in this country and the UK to analyze the malware and develop detection and remediation tools, we are showing the strength that public-private partnership brings to our country’s cyber security. The department remains committed to confronting and disrupting nation-state hacking, in whatever form it takes.”
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