The U.S. government will try to wrestle hundreds of thousands of infected routers from control of hackers

The U.S. government will try to wrestle hundreds of thousands of infected routers from control of hackers who apparently were planning to attack Ukraine. Cisco Systems and Symantec warn that a half-million internet-connected routers have been compromised, the Associated Press reports. “FBI has seized a key website communicating with the massive army of hijacked devices, disrupting what could have been — and might still be — an ambitious cyber attack by the Russian government-aligned hacking group widely known as Fancy Bear,” reports Raphael Satter, AP’s European technology reporter. “Cisco said the malicious software, which it and Symantec both dubbed VPNFilter after a folder it creates, was sitting on more than 500,000 routers in 54 countries but mostly in Ukraine, and had the capacity to render them unusable — a massively disruptive move if carried out at such a scale.”