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UPDATE After publication, the US Justice Department walked back its earlier claims that multiple US government agencies were hacked by Beijing's cyberspies. In an updated press release, the feds removed "victims," and now says NASA, the Federal Reserve, departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, along with the National Institutes of Health, and the US Senate were "targets."
The FBI on Wednesday said it disrupted a botnet and seized two platforms that Chinese-government cyberoperatives used to hack NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks.
The Federal Reserve, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health were also among those victimized by the two now-seized hacking tools: a vulnerability scanning and exploitation malware named QScan, and an obfuscation network named QTRouter.
The FBI says a People's Republic (PRC) of China-backed group called QTFY created and operated the two platforms, plus botnets of compromised IoT devices. The Bureau says QTFY's hackers work for a private PRC company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei.
[...] QScan scans and automatically infects thousands of IoT devices worldwide, and then adds them to the QTRouter network of QTFY-controlled devices.
The QTRouter botnet – consisting of these compromised IoT devices, plus commercial proxy service devices, and leased virtual private servers – then serves as an obfuscation network, allowing QTFY and other criminals who pay for the service to conceal the origin of their digital intrusion activities, making these communications appear to originate from local computers.
On Monday, a US federal court granted seizure warrants for three domains linked to QTFY: qtproxy.xyz, qt-proxy.org, and qt-team.com. All three domains were hardcoded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware, and the court-authorized seizures made both hacking services inoperable, the Justice Department said.
The hacking services and malware have been in use since at least 2018, and as recently as this year when QTFY infrastructure compromised the US Senate, according to court documents.
[...] This latest disruption follows a series of court-ordered seizures intended to hamstring China's hacking activities over the last few years. In 2025, the FBI removed PlugX surveillance malware from more than 4,000 US computers that had been infected by the PRC-sponsored group Mustang Panda.
A year earlier, in 2024, China's Flax Typhoon burned down their own botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of infected internet-of-things devices when confronted by the feds. And in late 2023, the FBI disrupted a botnet used by yet another Chinese government attack crew, Volt Typhoon, to attack US and foreign critical infrastructure.
In June, however, Lumen's Black Lotus Labs reported a "significant resurgence" of a botnet linked to Volt Typhoon, with this cluster of injected machines surging to 1,500 compromised routers and IoT devices.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday September 01, @08:07PM (6 children)
Why do you think Trump's DoJ is hiding them? Senator Whitehouse basically said on the senate floor that Epstein was working for Putin as blackmailer. Seems there is probably a movie or more with very, very wealthy people doing very illegal, immoral, disgusting things and laughing about it.
The "patriotic" Defense Secretary Hegseth carries an American flag in his jacket's snot rag pocket.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03, @04:37PM
For the same reason Obama's/Biden's DoJ was hiding them. It reveals that Epstein is not partisan. And please, stick a fork in the "Putin" shtick, it's done. We know why Trump wins, he has no opposition, nothing to do with Putin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @06:43AM (4 children)
And where's the actual evidence for that?
Epstein seems to have far more and stronger Israeli links than Russian.
Ex Israeli prime minister: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ehud-barak-met-with-jeffrey-epstein-dozens-of-times-flew-on-private-plane-report/ [timesofisrael.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehud_Barak#Relationship_with_Jeffrey_Epstein [wikipedia.org]
His girlfriend's dad must have had rather strong ties with Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_of_Jeffrey_Epstein#Ghislaine_Maxwell [wikipedia.org]
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-was-a-villain-laid-to-rest-among-heroes/ [timesofisrael.com]
Others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Les_Wexner_and_Jeffrey_Epstein [wikipedia.org]
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/epstein-files-show-swiss-bank-ceo-de-rothschild-kept-up-yearslong-personal-2026-02-05/ [reuters.com]
In contrast it seems more like Epstein tried to get closed to Putin but got rejected: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/08/politics/epstein-putin-russian-officials-connections [cnn.com]
Feel free to search for Putin in the DoJ Epstein files, but look at the actual results.
Compare with search results for Barak and the others I mentioned.
Compare with search results for Trump too if you like.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein [justice.gov]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday September 04, @09:36AM (3 children)
If anyone wants to contest those claims is going to have to agree to produce the documents that he has quoted. Don't forget that Whitehouse believes that he has already seen enough of them to state what he has, and he has a legal background. If that is a challenge in court then it will have to go through the process of discovery - the documents will have to be produced and the contents revealed. Bingo!
If they do not formally contest the claims then it doesn't look like they have much of an argument to support their denials, does it?
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, or will Senator Whitehouse meet with an 'accident'?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @06:00PM (2 children)
Oooo, never took you for such a conspiracy theorist :-)
What remains of the "Epstein files" is completely useless for any criminal trial, really only suitable for the gossip rags. Whitehouse is safe. The only person who met with an 'accident' in this Epstein affair is Epstein. Or do you still believe he committed suicide just because the government says so? I mean, really where's the evidence for that? We're looking at the same kind of speculation from the same kind of people that blame China for the hacks. Are we ever going to demand the facts before believing such accusations? Or we just going to keep taking everything they say at face value because of "sources familiar with the matter"?
To put it simply, mass media "news" is incredible, unbelievable BS.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday September 04, @06:35PM (1 child)
My error, I had assumed that things said by a Senator in the Senate were sacrosanct as are things said by an MP in Parliament. Knowingly lying to Parliament will get you kicked out for a period of time. Whatever is said however has some degree of legal protection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @08:00PM
:-) For how long have you suffered this condition? And the MPs? Maybe they're just better at not getting caught?
That doesn't necessarily mean they're telling the truth. It only implies an appeal to authority because of the status of the person making the statement.