US seizes domains of Chinese botnet used to hack NASA, Justice Department, and the Senate

The FBI has seized a series of domains that were used by a large-scale botnet to coordinate and launch China-backed cyberattacks against American targets.

According to the Justice Department’s statement on Wednesday, the seizures of the botnet’s domains deny the operators access to the platforms. The botnet was allegedly used by the Chinese government to break into computers across the United States, including systems at hospitals, defense contractors, and several federal government departments.

Prosecutors said the China state-sponsored group, known as QTFY, was run by a Chinese company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Tech, which created and operated the botnet of thousands of compromised internet-connected devices. The botnet aimed to serve as obfuscation networks, which hide the malicious traffic of hackers to make their activity more difficult to detect.