Vigilante Botnet Infects Computers to Remove Cryptocurrency Malware

Botnets have become increasingly powerful over the last few years, to the point where the US Department of Homeland Security admitted that they couldn’t face the problem alone and needed help from the white hat community.

Botnets consist of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of internet-connected devices which are then used to carry out to send spam messages en masse or to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crashing online services. CCN has reported before on how botnets infected millions of computers last year with cryptojacking software designed to siphon CPU power for and use it to secretly mine crypto for the malware owners.

A particularly notorious botnet called ‘Mirai’ famously hijacked IoT devices to mine Bitcoin – while IoT devices are individually extremely ineffective, Mirai is a particularly virulent piece of malware that infected thousands of devices in a short space of time to take small profits from all of them. While the term botnet…