International Operation Disrupts Sality P2P Botnet
US-led international operation with Europol, CrowdStrike, and Shadowserver sinkholed the 20-year-old Sality P2P botnet, once exceeding one million infected machines.
On August 31, 2026, authorities from the US, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, supported by Europol, CrowdStrike, and the Shadowserver Foundation, disrupted the Sality P2P botnet by sinkholing communications and seizing domains. Sality has operated for over 20 years, at its peak controlling more than one million infected machines used for credential theft, spam, proxy services, crypto-theft, and DDoS attacks, with over 11 million unique IP addresses linked to its infrastructure since 2017. The disruption exploited the botnet's super-peer reputation mechanism by removing legitimate peers via protocol-level manipulation and inserting sinkhole entries into emptied peer lists.