Tag Archives: Distributed Denial of Secrets

Overlords of the Internet: Botnet Warfare

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U.S. Federal authorities disrupted in August 2025 a network of hacked devices used by criminals in some of the largest online attacks yet seen… Law-enforcement agencies and technology companies are waging a war against increasingly powerful networks of hacked devices, called botnets, that can knock websites offline for a fee. They are used for extortion and by disreputable companies to knock rivals offline… These botnets are leveraging new types of internet-connected devices with faster processors and more network bandwidth, offering them immense power. The criminals controlling the botnets now have the capabilities to move beyond website takedowns to target internet connectivity and disrupt very large swaths of the internet.“Before the concern was websites; now the concern is countries,” said Craig Labovitz, head of technology with Nokia’s Deepfield division. 

Apprehending botnet criminals in August 2025 appeared to have an unwanted consequence: freeing up as many as 95,000 devices to be taken over by new botnet overlords. That led to a free-for-all to take over the machines “as fast as possible,” said Damian Menscher, a Google engineer. The operators of a rival botnet, called Aisuru, seized control of more than one-fourth of them and immediately started launching attacks that are “breaking records,” he said.

On Sept. 1, 2025 the network services company Cloudflare said it had measured an attack that clogged up computer networks with 11.5 trillion bits of junk information per second. That is enough to consume the download bandwidth of more than 50,000 consumer internet connections. Cloudflare declared this attack, known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, a “world record” in terms of intensity. Some analysts see it almost as an advertisement of the botnet’s capabilities…

Botnets such as Aisuru are made up of a range of internet-connected devices—routers or security cameras, for example—rather than PCs, and often these machines can only join one botnet at a time. Their attacks can typically be fended off by the largest cloud-computing providers. One massive network that Google disrupted in 2025 had mushroomed from at least 74,000 Android devices in 2023 to more than 10 million devices in two years. That made it the “largest known botnet of internet-connected TV devices,” according to a July 2025 Google court filing.

Excerpts from Robert McMillan, The Feds Destroyed an Internet Weapon, but Criminals Picked Up the Pieces, WSJ, Sept. 15, 2025

To Know the Truth Even if it Harms You

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Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, an NGO, had been a thorn in the side of secretive governments, corrupt corporations, and powerful law firms since its founding in late 2018. In June 2020, in a release known as BlueLeaks, the group published 269 gigabytes of law enforcement data, which exposed police malfeasance and surveillance overreach across the United States.

DDoSecrets also published incriminating records from overseas tax shelters, from the social media site Gab, and from a Christian crowdfunding site often used by the far right. The group has affected autocrats as well, exposing the Russian government’s plans in Ukraine and mapping out the Myanmar junta’s business dealings. These revelations have spawned numerous news stories in the public interest, making DDoSecrets a valuable source for journalists, but also rendering it a target: In July 2020, German authorities seized one of the organization’s servers. August of 2020 brought ominous news of a Department of Homeland Security bulletin labeling DDoSecrets a “criminal hacker group.” ..

Avowedly nonpartisan, DDoSecrets nonetheless exhibits an ethos that seems to fuse anarchist politics, a hacker’s curiosity about forbidden knowledge, and a general sympathy for the oppressed. Its barbed Latin slogan, Veritatem cognoscere ruat caelum et pereat mundus, roughly translates to, “To know the truth, even if the heavens fall and the world perishes.” Call it a bolder, more transformative version of “information wants to be free.”

Emma Best…launched DDoSecrets in December 2018 with someone known only by the pseudonym “The Architect.” Together, they set out to distinguish their group from WikiLeaks, which they felt had morphed into a vehicle for Julian Assange’s ego…”Truth has an impact, regardless of the respectability politics some people choose to engage in when it comes to the alleged sources,” Best wrote after Swiss law enforcement, at the request of U.S. authorities, arrested Tillie Kottmann, a hacker who alerted journalists to security vulnerabilities in a vast commercial network of surveillance cameras. “The world can no longer be rid of hacktivists or leaktivists. Not as long as people are willing.”

Excerpts from Jacob Silverman, The New WikiLeaks, The New Republic, Aug. 18, 2021