Dutch authorities have taken offline a massive botnet of 17 million devices and seized more than 200 servers at a local provider that supported the operation.
The action was carried out following an investigation from the Police in collaboration with the country's cybersecurity agency, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
According to the authorities, the seized servers controlled "computers, tablets, and smartphones to carry out cyberattacks."
Botnets are networks of compromised devices used for illegal activities such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, malicious traffic proxying, or cryptocurrency mining.
“The investigation revealed that the botnet consisted of at least 17 million infected devices and that the 200 servers used to host the infrastructure were located in the Netherlands,” the NCSC said.
