Law enforcement shuts down botnet made of tens of thousands of hacked routers

A global law enforcement operation seized SocksEscort, a criminal service built on the AVRecon botnet of compromised SOHO routers that provided paid proxy access for illegal activity; authorities reported roughly 280,000–369,000 infected devices across 163 countries and removed the service, which was used to facilitate bank and cryptocurrency theft, fraudulent claims, ransomware, DDoS, and CSAM distribution.