FBI quietly cleans more than 700,000 pcs around the world of malicious programmes related to Qakbot

[butters]

while it's difficult to get permission from the courts for this kind of operation, the FBI were granted a warrant to clean pcs of this cybercriminals' tool by telling them 'not to listen to Qakbot'. The FBI worked with France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Romania and Latvia in this operation.

Keith Jarvis, a senior researcher at the Atlanta cybersecurity company Secureworks, which was monitoring the botnet and its takedown, told NBC News that most computers infected with Qakbot were likely effectively fixed in the first few hours of the FBI operation.

In a media call after the announcement, an FBI official who requested not to be identified, said that the FBI developed a particular removal tool for the operation. Victims will not be notified that their devices had been fixed or that they had ever been compromised, he said.

However, the FBI gave the names and email addresses of some of the people who had been hacked to Have I Been Pwned, a website that allows anyone to check if they appear in certain major data breaches. Have I Been Pwned added 6.4 million email accounts tied to Qakbot to its database on Tuesday.

so if you're wondering if your pc was compromised then fixed, maybe go see if your name/email shows up there. I won't go, but i'm lazy.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...1&cvid=4c5aaa4a57004275a2cf500fe2db155a&ei=55