An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Authorities in the Netherlands said they dismantled a botnet that comprised more than 17 million devices and were managed by 200 servers in a joint operation by the police and the National Cyber Security Center. The action, announced Thursday, came about after a security researcher reported the sprawling network to authorities. The host infrastructure was located in the Netherlands. "The police then seized several botnet servers from a hosting provider for investigation," the NCSC said. "The botnet was taken offline by the provider because it was used for criminal purposes."

According to a report Thursday by the NL Times, the botnet wa...