The Invisible Hijack: Inside the Massive ‘Popa’ Botnet Fueling the Global AI Scraping Economy

For the past four years, a digital shadow has loomed over millions of living rooms worldwide. A sprawling, Android-based botnet known as Popa has quietly commandeered consumer TV streaming boxes, transforming them into relay points for massive, global-scale data scraping, advertising fraud, and unauthorized account access. This week, a multi-firm investigation—involving researchers from Qurium, Synthient,…

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The Fall of ‘Dort’: Global Investigation Leads to Arrest of Kimwolf Botnet Mastermind

In a significant victory for international law enforcement, a 23-year-old Ottawa man, identified as Jacob Butler—known in clandestine corners of the internet by the handle "Dort"—was arrested this week on charges of engineering and operating the "Kimwolf" botnet. The arrest marks the culmination of a high-stakes, six-month investigation into one of the most prolific and…

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