“The FBI says that between October 2021 and April 2023, the Qakbot operators earned approximately $58 million from ransomware payments.”
Operation Duck Hunt redirected the botnet’s traffic to FBI servers and found about 700,000 infected devices, 200,000 of them in the US. Then agents pushed their own shellcode to every one of them and shut Qakbot down. The government now runs code on private computers without asking, and everyone cheers because this time it was a removal tool. The $58 million is already gone, and those 700,000 machines are still unpatched.