- Google presents an important lawsuit with a district court
- The demand states that Google lost money and reputation due to Badbox 2.0
- 25 unidentified Chinese people are accused of administering the scheme
Google has sued 25 Chinese citizens not identified for building and operating the notorious Botnet Badbox 2.0.
A legal complaint filed by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, said the defendants created and operated a botnet that infected more than 10 million devices connected to the Internet worldwide. The devices include TV transmission boxes, tablets, projectors and automobile information and entertainment systems, which are executed mainly in AOSP (Android open source project), and are not protected by Google Play Protect.
The malware was previously carried out on devices (through an attack of the supply chain), or was downloaded through deceptive applications, and once infected, the devices are connected to a command and control server (C2), granting the remote control of the threat of the actors.
Residential proxy and advertising fraud
The 25 people in the complaint allegedly used the botnet to offer residential representatives, commit advertising fraud and click fraud. Google says they sold access to infected devices as residential representatives, hiding the identity of the buyers and allowing them to commit their own crimes: accounts of accounts, theft of credentials, ddos attacks and more.
The defendants also used them to generate impressions and clicks of false ads, launch hidden browsers to interact with places with great advertising and implement “evil twin” applications that mimic legitimate applications, deceiving users and users and advertising platforms.
It seems that the part of advertising fraud is particularly worrying for Google. The company says that it is forced to pay for fraudulent advertising traffic and spend resources to investigate and mitigate the botnet. He also argues that Botnet undermines confidence in the Google platform, eroding its reputation, which also leads to less profits in the future.
Unfortunately, the chances of China identifying and extraditing these individuals are almost none. The country rarely cooperates with the USA in matters of cybersecurity, since the two countries are seen as adversaries, which often exchanged blows to cyberspace.
Through The registration
