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Authorities Turn Sality's P2P Network Against Itself, Cutting Off New Malware Payloads
US and European authorities with CrowdStrike dismantled the two-decade-old Sality P2P botnet using peer-list manipulation, blocking payload delivery to infected hosts.
The US Department of Justice announced a coordinated takedown of the Sality peer-to-peer botnet, executed August 31, 2026 by authorities from the US, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania with CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation. Sality, active since 2003, infects Windows executables and delivers payloads including the EggJagger crypto clipper, which stole at least $150,000, and was used for DDoS campaigns. The operation abused the botnet's peer-list maintenance cycle to insert sinkhole nodes and isolate both super peers and NAT-hidden infections, cutting off URL and payload distribution to more than 15,000 infected machines across two P2P networks.
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MILE TEA: Cyber Espionage Campaign Targets Asia Pacific Businesses and Government Agencies
Unit 42 names MILE TEA, a cyber-espionage campaign since 2011 targeting Japanese and Taiwanese businesses and government agencies with e-ticket phishing lures and Elirks-family malware.
Unit 42 tracks the MILE TEA espionage campaign, observed as early as 2011, targeting Japanese trading, petroleum, and mobile companies, a Beijing office of a Japanese public organization, and a Taiwanese government agency. The primary infection vector is spear-phishing emails with attachments, mostly custom executable installers posing as flight e-tickets, dropping Elirks, Micrass, or Logedrut as initial bridgehead malware. Elirks and Logedrut retrieve encrypted C2 addresses from attacker-posted blog articles, decoded with Base64 and TEA or DES ciphers. The campaign's focus shifted from Taiwan to Japan around 2013.
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