Google is suing 17 people, including two Russians, whom the company accused of creating the Glupteba botnet, which infected more than a million Windows computers. Google names Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov as the main operators of Glupteba, citing the Gmail and Google Workspace accounts they allegedly created to operate the botnet.

Google claims that the defendants used the botnet for illegal purposes: Glupteba secretly mines cryptocurrency , steals Google account data and sets up a proxy to redirect traffic. The company demands that Starovikov and Filippov pay damages and that they were banned from using Google services forever.

According to Google, the Glupteba botnet has infected more than a million computers, and this number is growing by a thousand devices a day. Google has deleted about 63 million Google documents, over 1000 accounts and over 900 Google Cloud projects that were used to distribute Glupteba.

The corporation notes that the botnet stands out from its peers due to its technical complexity. The company's threat analysis team, which monitored Glupteba, announced that operators no longer control the botnet. However, Glupteba can get back to work thanks to blockchain-based failure protection. When the botnet's control server goes offline, Glupteba scans the blockchain for transactions associated with three specific Bitcoin addresses that are controlled by Glupteba Enterprise. As such, the Glupteba botnet cannot be completely eradicated without neutralizing its blockchain-based infrastructure, Google points out.

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