Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs has successfully disrupted more than 550 command-and-control (C2) servers connected to the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets, a large-scale malicious infrastructure widely used for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and residential proxy abuse.
Aisuru operates as a DDoS-for-hire platform and deliberately avoids targeting government and military entities. However, broadband service providers have borne the brunt of its activity, with attacks surpassing 1.5Tb/sec originating from compromised customer devices, causing severe service interruptions.
Similar to other TurboMirai-based botnets, Aisuru includes enhanced DDoS capabilities alongside multifunctional features. These allow threat actors to engage in a range of illegal operations such as credential stuffing, AI-powered web scraping, spam campaigns, phishing attacks, and proxy services.
The botnet launches assaults using UDP, TCP, and GRE flood techniques, leveraging medium-sized packets with randomized ports and flags. Traffic volumes exceeding 1Tb/sec from infected customer premises equipment (CPEs) have disrupted broadband networks, while packet floods surpassing 4 billion packets per second have led to router line card failures.
Kimwolf, a recently identified Android-based botnet closely associated with Aisuru, has compromised more than 1.8 million devices and generated over 1.7 billion DDoS commands, according to cybersecurity firm XLab.
Primarily targeting Android TV boxes, the Kimwolf botnet is built using the Android NDK and includes capabilities such as DDoS attacks, proxy forwarding, reverse shell access, and file management. To conceal its operations, it encrypts sensitive information using a simple Stack XOR method, employs DNS over TLS for communication obfuscation, and verifies C2 commands through elliptic curve digital signatures. Newer variants also use EtherHiding, leveraging blockchain-based domains to evade takedown efforts.
Kimwolf variants follow a consistent naming convention of “niggabox + v[number],” with versions v4 and v5 currently observed in the wild. Researchers who seized control of a single C2 domain recorded interactions from approximately 2.7 million IP addresses within three days, reinforcing estimates that infections exceed 1.8 million devices. The botnet’s globally distributed infrastructure, multiple C2 servers, and varied versions make precise infection counts difficult.
Although Kimwolf borrows elements from the Aisuru codebase, its operators significantly modified it to avoid detection. While traffic proxying is its primary function, the botnet is capable of executing large-scale DDoS campaigns. This was evident during a three-day window between November 19 and 22, when it issued 1.7 billion attack commands.
Lumen observed daily bot traffic to Aisuru C2 servers rise sharply from 50,000 to 200,000 connections in September 2025. Upon validating the emergence of a new botnet, the company blocked the traffic and null-routed more than 550 C2 servers.
By examining C2 infrastructure and residential proxy traffic, researchers traced links to Canadian IP addresses and shared this intelligence with law enforcement agencies.
“The Canadian IPs in question were using SSH to access 194.46.59[.]169, which resolved to proxy-sdk.14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132[.]su. In short order, we would learn that the Aisuru backend C2 we were tracking adopted the domain name client.14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132[.]su, a similarity that further tied these servers together” reads the report published by Lumen.
In early October, Black Lotus Labs detected infrastructure shifts signaling the rise of the Kimwolf botnet. Its growth was rapid, adding hundreds of thousands of infected devices within weeks, largely through exploitation of insecure residential proxy services. By mid-October, infections had reached approximately 800,000 devices, with the botnet actively scanning proxy networks to accelerate expansion.
Black Lotus Labs initiated disruption efforts against Kimwolf in October by swiftly null-routing its C2 servers. While operators were able to reestablish operations within hours, Lumen persistently blocked new infrastructure as it surfaced. Through continuous monitoring, collaboration with industry partners, and integration of threat indicators into its security products, Lumen worked to reduce the botnet’s operational capacity over time.
“To date, we have null-routed over 550 Aisuru/Kimwolf servers in 4 months as part of our efforts to combat this botnet, leading its operators to some distress, as noted in Xlabs’ post, showing the actors addressing Lumen with profanity in one DDoS payload” concludes the report.