Security News > 2023 > November > Russian national pleads guilty to building now-dismantled IPStorm proxy botnet

The FBI says it has dismantled another botnet and collared its operator, who admitted hijacking tens of thousands of machines around the world to create his network of nodes.

Sergei Makinin, a Russian and Moldovan national, was cuffed in Florida in January and sent to Puerto Rico, where he pleaded guilty [PDF] in September, details of which were only publicized today by the US Department of Justice.

First discovered in May of that year, IPStorm used its own P2P protocol that piggybacked IPFS to mask its activities and hide itself among legitimate IPFS traffic, a known problem with the underlying protocol The Register reported on previously.

Rather than using the botnet to steal or ransom data, Makinin appears to have simply been out to make a few bucks letting others use his network of nodes as a set of proxies through which traffic could be directed, obfuscating the source of connections.

"The main purpose of the botnet was to turn infected devices into proxies as part of a for-profit scheme, which made access to these proxies available through Makinin's websites," the DoJ said today in a statement on Makinin's guilty plea.

Makinin's botnet is no more, but that doesn't mean others won't rise to abuse IPFS in its place.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/11/14/russian_ipstorm_botnet/