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The Dutch police have posted messages on various hacker forums emphasising their aggressive stance against cybercrime. The police recently took down a major botnet.

The messages were posted on Raid and XSS, two forums that are very accessible and popular with hackers, writes ZDNet. In the messages, the police boast of taking down the Emotet botnet, which the authority describes as one of the most prolific botnets of the past decade. The police call hosting criminal infrastructure in the Netherlands a lost cause.

“The Nederlands Police will continue to focus on the abuse of our infrastructure. We aim at botnets and related malware like Ryuk, Trickbot and many more. We feed on underground information sources and the cybersecurity industry. Wwe will leave no stone unturned in finding those committed to cybercrime. You might lose your liberty, not just your bots and business. As you know, the Netherlands Police is always the first to see next seasons catalogues.”

YouTube video

The message is complemented by a video on YouTube in which it reiterates the successes of the Dutch police, with images of servers being seized and hackers being arrested. The video ends with the text: “Everyone makes mistakes. We are waiting for yours.”

What exactly the police want to achieve with the messages is not clear. It is possible that the police hope to scare off future attackers, but a reverse reaction is also possible. There is a chance that the attackers feel challenged by such a message and will therefore try to aim their focus at the Netherlands.

Emotet

Recently, the Dutch police, in collaboration with international parties, managed to take down the Emotet botnet. The botnet was installed on more than 1 million devices and managed to get hold of mountains of personal data, such as e-mail addresses and passwords. This data is presumably used to steal more personal data and use it for phishing or identity theft. Emotet was not the only success of the Dutch police. In the past, the agency has taken down dozens of botnets and other methods of attack.