The Justice Department says it has launched a coordinated campaign to bring down Avalanche, a web of computer servers it says has hosted a couple dozen malware campaigns costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The operation is being conducted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the FBI – Pittsburgh Division, and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the United States Department of Justice, in close cooperation with the Public Prosecutor’s Office Verden and the Luneburg Police of Germany, Europol and Eurojust, located in The Hague, Netherlands, and investigators and prosecutors from more than 40 countries," said law enforcement officials in a joint statement.
The idea is to dismantle the network of servers and seize or block over 800,000 domain names associated with the network.
DOJ said that more than 50 servers have been taken offline, but that the network has probably infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide.
