| The FBI targeted infrastructure supporting a massive botnet operated by Chinese state-sponsored hackers, known as Flax Typhoon in Microsoft's nomenclature for hacking groups. "Flax Typhoon was one of the first times the FBI engaged in true cyber warfare, in real time, against CCP actors," said Brett Leatherman, assistant director for cyber at the FBI, speaking at a cybersecurity conference hosted by the law-enforcement agency and Fordham University. The botnet numbered more than 200,000 infected devices in the U.S. and elsewhere, court documents said. The devices included internet routers, cameras, storage devices and others, and were used to launch attacks on U.S. and foreign government agencies, companies, universities, telecoms providers and media organizations. The FBI, in its battle last year, sent commands through the infected devices to bring the botnet under their control, disabling the so-called command and control infrastructure used by Flax Typhoon. However, the hackers fought back. "They DDoSed the FBI infrastructure," said Leatherman, using an acronym referring to distributed denial of service, a form of cyberattack in which servers are overloaded with traffic, usually from botnets, crashing them in the process. "They successfully pulled back a bunch of their bots, it was incredible." Over the course of a weekend, Leatherman said, the FBI battled with the hackers, who seemed to be unaware they were facing off against the U.S. government until the agency managed to wrest control of the bots' infrastructure. The bureau uploaded a splash page and seized the domain. Flax Typhoon then realized they had attacked the FBI. "They actually burned down their own infrastructure at that point. We didn't have to do it," Leatherman said. – James Rundle | 
