FBI boss says China 'burned down' 260,000-device botnet when confronted by Feds

The report describes U.S. law enforcement disruption of a China-linked group dubbed Flax Typhoon that had built a Mirai-based botnet (~260,000 devices) and a 1.2M-record database of compromised hosts used to target U.S. critical infrastructure, government, and academia; FBI and NSA gained control of C2 servers, the actors attempted DDoS and fallback controls, then destroyed their infrastructure. The article also covers the FBI's ransomware response efforts, including negotiating payments in extreme cases and sharing decryption keys to help victims recover.