Europol and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a crackdown on the malicious proxy network SocksEscort, freezing approximately 3.5 million dollars in cryptocurrency associated with the network. The operation, codenamed Operation Lightning, involved law enforcement agencies seizing 34 domains and 23 servers across 7 countries. The investigation revealed that the network infected approximately 369,000 routers and IoT devices, operating over 35,000 proxy nodes across 163 countries, which were used for ransomware attacks, DDoS attacks, and fraud activities including banking and cryptocurrency account takeovers. (Decrypt)