Authorities arrest man allegedly running "likely world's largest ever" cybercrime botnet

abcnews.go.com:

An international law enforcement team has arrested a Chinese national and disrupted a major botnet that officials said he ran for nearly a decade

WASHINGTON — An international law enforcement team has arrested a Chinese national and disrupted a major botnet that officials said he ran for nearly a decade, amassing at least $99 million in profits by reselling access to criminals who used it for identity theft, child exploitation and financial fraud including pandemic relief scams.

The U.S. Department of Justice quoted FBI Director Christopher Wray as saying Wednesday that the “911 S5” botnet — a network of malware-infected computers in nearly 200 countries — was likely the world's largest.

Justice said in a news release that Yunhe Wang, 35, was arrested May 24. It did not say where and department officials did not immediately respond to a query on that.

The cybercriminals used a network of zombie residential computers to steal “billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers and accountholders, and federal lending programs since 2014,” according to an indictment filed in Texas’ eastern district.

The administrator, Wang, sold access to the 19 million Windows computers he hijacked — more than 613,000 in the United States — to criminals who “used that access to commit a staggering array of crimes that victimized children, threatened people’s safety and defrauded financial institutions and federal lending programs,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the takedown.

He said criminals who purchased access to the zombie network from Wang were responsible for more than $5.9 billion in estimated losses due to fraud against relief programs. Officials estimated 560,000 fraudulent