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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Treasury Sanctions Creators of 911 S5 Proxy Botnet

Summary: The U.S. Treasury sanctioned three Chinese nationals - Yunhe Wang, Jingping Liu and Yanni Zheng - plus Wang's firm Spicy Code Company Limited and two Wang-controlled property companies, for allegedly operating the 911 S5 anonymity service, which from 2015 to July 2022 sold daily access to hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs turned into traffic relays through 'free' VPN software. The DOJ announced Wang's arrest the same day, stating 911 S5 customers stole billions, including an estimated 560,000 fraudulent unemployment insurance claims from compromised IP addresses with confirmed losses exceeding $5.9 billion and more than 47,000 EIDL applications from compromised addresses.

Why it matters: The $5.9 billion in confirmed pandemic-relief fraud tied to 560,000 claims shows how a cheap proxy service built on silently bundled VPN software converted infected consumer PCs into the last mile for large-scale financial theft.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

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