Authorities in the Netherlands stated they took apart a botnet that consisted of more than 17 million gadgets and were handled by 200 servers in a joint operation by the cops and the National Cyber Security.

The action, revealed Thursday, happened after a security scientist reported the vast network to authorities. The host facilities lay in the Netherlands.

Utilized for criminal functions

“The authorities then took numerous botnet servers from a hosting supplier for examination,” the NCSC stated. “The botnet was taken offline by the company since it was utilized for criminal functions.”

According to a report Thursday by the NL Times, the botnet was connected to ASOCKS, a Russia-based business that offers property proxy services. These services deal with individuals and companies who wish to obscure their places or identities by proxying their Internet traffic through third-party gadgets. Proxy services are typically utilized for illegal or dishonest functions such as carrying out DDoS attacks, running botnet command-and-control servers, running phishing operations, and scraping site material.

Ars was not able to separately verify the NL Times report, however the claim checks out. Thursday’s NCSC post connected to a different post that the not-for-profit company released a day previously. That post, in turn, was upgraded to include a link to Thursday’s post. Wednesday’s post, headlined “Residential proxies and their significant influence on digital security in the Netherlands,” alerted: “Residential proxies are utilized to keep privacy and prevent geographical limitations. In this method, a Dutch company can be assaulted with Dutch proxies that have resemblances with ‘routine’ traffic, making cybercrime mitigation harder.”