According to Director Christopher Wray, the “911 S5” botnet was perhaps the biggest in the world. It infected computers in around 200 nations and enabled a wide range of crimes, such as financial fraud, identity theft, and child abuse.
By selling access to criminals who exploited it for frauds, Yunhe Wang allegedly made at least $99 million (£78 million), which she used to purchase luxury vehicles and real estate all throughout the world.
A botnet is a distant network of compromised computers that hackers use to launch large-scale scams and cyberattacks.
They have complete control over the “zombie” computers, which they can exploit to install apps, track activities, and collect personal information.
Wang, 35, was detained in Singapore last week, and according to Brett Leatherman, the FBI’s deputy assistant director for cyber operations, $29 million (£22.8 million) in bitcoin was taken into custody.
As per a Texas indictment, the botnet was utilized to pilfer “billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers and accountholders, and federal lending programs since 2014”.
It was stated that the network had infected 613,000 computers in the US alone.
560,000 false unemployment insurance claims were among the approximately $5.9 billion (£4.64 billion) in fraud perpetrated by those who used it, according to US Attorney General Merrick Garland.
