When a big cybersecurity threat emerges, the people in charge of taking it down are the engineers and network operators who keep the internet running.

I think of them as wizards. The wizards of the internet.

That's our colleague Bob McMillan, who covers cybersecurity.

And he says that over the last year, the Wizards of the Internet faced something at a scale

they had never encountered before.

It was called Kim Wolf.

Kim Wolf.

Kim Wolf.

A fast-growing botnet called Kim Wolf.

One of the most extreme botnet operations ever observed.

What makes Kim Wolf different is how it spreads.

Quietly hijacking nearly 2 million Android devices across the globe.

The scale alone is staggering.

What the Internet Wizards saw was a somewhat familiar across the globe. The scale alone is staggering.

What the Internet Wizard saw was a somewhat familiar threat,

a network of bots engaging in distributed denial of service attacks.

So DDoS attacks are basically when you get a bunch of computers and they flood another computer with just like junk data.

Like, hey, could you send me this web page?

And that junk data eventually slows down the computer to the point where it doesn't work.

They sort of flood the zone with internet traffic and then the target doesn't work anymore.

But Kim Wolf's attacks were strange because they were coming from millions of devices,

products connected to the internet like phones, cameras, and TV boxes.

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