US government ‘took control’ of a botnet run by Chinese government hackers, says FBI director

Flax Typhoon, a China-linked hacking operation that used Mirai malware to amass a botnet of roughly 260,000 compromised IoT devices (with a database of over 1.2M records and ~385,000 unique U.S. victims), was disrupted by the FBI in coordination with U.S. agencies; the botnet was used to conceal government-directed operations against critical infrastructure and other targets, and authorities performed court-authorized takedown and malware removal.