The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the arrest of a Canadian man in connection with allegedly operating a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet known as Kimwolf.
In tandem, Jacob Butler (aka Dort), 23, Ottawa, Canada, has been charged with offenses related to the development and operation of the botnet. Kimwolf is assessed to be a variant of AISURU that specifically infected Android devices with an exposed Android Debug Bridge (ADB) service.
“Kimwolf targeted infected devices which were traditionally ‘firewalled’ from the rest of the internet, such as digital photo frames and web cameras,” the DoJ said. “The infected devices were enslaved by the botnet operators.”
“The operators then used a ‘cybercrime-as-a-service’ model to sell access to the infected devices to other cybercriminals. The operators and their customers forced the victim devices to participate in DDoS attacks, targeting computers and servers located throughout the world, including Department of Defense Information Network (DoDIN) IP addresses.”
Court documents show that Butler was linked to the administration of the Kimwolf botnet through IP address, online account information, and Discord message records posted by an account called resi[.]to.
That Butler was behind the Kimwolf botnet was first exposed by independent security journalist Brian Krebs earlier this February. At that time, the defendant claimed that he had not used the “Dort” persona since 2021 and that some other party was impersonating him after compromising his old account.
The charges come exactly two months after U.S. authorities, in partnership with Canada and Germany, disrupted the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure associated with Kimwolf, AISURU, JackSkid, and Mossad as part of a court-authorized law enforcement operation.
Per the DoJ, Kimwolf is estimated to have issued over 25,000 attack commands. Prior to their takedown, the AISURU/Kimwolf botnets were attributed to some of the record-setting DDoS attacks to date, flooding targets with junk traffic that peaked at 31.4 Terabits per second (Tbps).
Besides Butler’s arrest, seizure warrants have been unsealed targeting online services supporting 45 DDoS-for-hire platforms, allowing law enforcement to dismantle them. One of the platforms is said to have collaborated with Kimwolf.
Butler has been charged with one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusion. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
