For the previous week, the large “Web of Issues” (IoT) botnet often known as Kimwolf has been disrupting The Invisible Web Challenge (I2P), a decentralized, encrypted communications community designed to anonymize and safe on-line communications. I2P customers began reporting disruptions within the community across the identical time the Kimwolf botmasters started counting on it to evade takedown makes an attempt in opposition to the botnet’s management servers.
Kimwolf is a botnet that surfaced in late 2025 and rapidly contaminated hundreds of thousands of programs, turning poorly secured IoT gadgets like TV streaming containers, digital image frames and routers into relays for malicious site visitors and abnormally massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults.
I2P is a decentralized, privacy-focused community that permits folks to speak and share data anonymously.
“It really works by routing information by way of a number of encrypted layers throughout volunteer-operated nodes, hiding each the sender’s and receiver’s places,” the I2P web site explains. “The result’s a safe, censorship-resistant community designed for personal web sites, messaging, and information sharing.”
On February 3, I2P customers started complaining on the group’s GitHub web page about tens of 1000’s of routers all of the sudden overwhelming the community, stopping current customers from speaking with respectable nodes. Customers reported a quickly rising variety of new routers becoming a member of the community that had been unable to transmit information, and that the mass inflow of recent programs had overwhelmed the community to the purpose the place customers may not join.
I2P customers complaining about service disruptions from a quickly rising variety of routers all of the sudden swamping the community.
When one I2P person requested whether or not the community was beneath assault, one other person replied, “Appears to be like prefer it. My bodily router freezes when the variety of connections exceeds 60,000.”
A graph shared by I2P builders exhibiting a marked drop in profitable connections on the I2P community across the time the Kimwolf botnet began making an attempt to make use of the community for fallback communications.
The identical day that I2P customers started noticing the outages, the people in command of Kimwolf posted to their Discord channel that they’d by accident disrupted I2P after making an attempt to affix 700,000 Kimwolf-infected bots as nodes on the community.
The Kimwolf botmaster brazenly discusses what they’re doing with the botnet in a Discord channel with my identify on it.
Though Kimwolf is named a potent weapon for launching DDoS assaults, the outages brought on this week by some portion of the botnet making an attempt to affix I2P are what’s often known as a “Sybil assault,” a risk in peer-to-peer networks the place a single entity can disrupt the system by creating, controlling, and working numerous faux, pseudonymous identities.
Certainly, the variety of Kimwolf-infected routers that attempted to affix I2P this previous week was many instances the community’s regular dimension. I2P’s Wikipedia web page says the community consists of roughly 55,000 computer systems distributed all through the world, with every participant performing as each a router (to relay site visitors) and a shopper.
Nevertheless, Lance James, founding father of the New York Metropolis primarily based cybersecurity consultancy Unit 221B and the unique founding father of I2P, advised KrebsOnSecurity the whole I2P community now consists of between 15,000 and 20,000 gadgets on any given day.
An I2P person posted this graph on Feb. 10, exhibiting tens of 1000’s of routers — principally from the USA — all of the sudden making an attempt to affix the community.
Benjamin Brundage is founding father of Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy companies and was the primary to doc Kimwolf’s distinctive spreading strategies. Brundage stated the Kimwolf operator(s) have been making an attempt to construct a command and management community that may’t simply be taken down by safety corporations and community operators which are working collectively to fight the unfold of the botnet.
Brundage stated the folks in command of Kimwolf have been experimenting with utilizing I2P and an identical anonymity community — Tor — as a backup command and management community, though there have been no experiences of widespread disruptions within the Tor community not too long ago.
“I don’t assume their objective is to take I2P down,” he stated. “It’s extra they’re on the lookout for an alternative choice to hold the botnet steady within the face of takedown makes an attempt.”
The Kimwolf botnet created challenges for Cloudflare late final 12 months when it started instructing hundreds of thousands of contaminated gadgets to make use of Cloudflare’s area identify system (DNS) settings, inflicting management domains related to Kimwolf to repeatedly usurp Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public rating of essentially the most incessantly requested web sites.
James stated the I2P community remains to be working at about half of its regular capability, and {that a} new launch is rolling out which ought to convey some stability enhancements over the following week for customers.
In the meantime, Brundage stated the excellent news is Kimwolf’s overlords seem to have fairly not too long ago alienated a few of their extra competent builders and operators, resulting in a rookie mistake this previous week that brought on the botnet’s total numbers to drop by greater than 600,000 contaminated programs.
“It looks like they’re simply testing stuff, like operating experiments in manufacturing,” he stated. “However the botnet’s numbers are dropping considerably now, they usually don’t appear to know what they’re doing.”
