The Justice Department on Tuesday said the FBI led a multinational effort involving the authorities from France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania and Latvia to take down criminal infrastructure, disabling malware known as Qakbot.
“The action represents the largest U.S.-led financial and technical disruption of a botnet infrastructure leveraged by cybercriminals to commit ransomware, financial fraud, and other cyber-enabled criminal activity,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
The department said it had seized about $8.6 million in cryptocurrency that criminals had amassed from ransom payments by victims and the money would be returned to victims.
