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The College Student Who Defeated the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon
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The Hacker Makes Contact: A Cat Meme and $30K a Month
At 19:32 · chapter starts 18:30
A week after Ben posted his IP-address tool on Discord, a message arrived from an unknown user who said, in effect, 'Nice try — you missed some.' The user attached screenshots proving it [1] — Benjamin Brundage "When Ben Brundage wanted to keep a KimWolf-connected hacker talking without spooking them, he sent a cat GIF — a tuxedo-wearing cat meant t…" 18:48 . Ben could tell from their typing style — the casual abbreviations, the GIFs, the emoji use — that this was probably someone close to his own age, not a seasoned criminal. Rather than confronting them, Ben played it cool, responding with a GIF of a cat in a tuxedo to signal he wasn't a threat. It worked. The hacker opened up, revealing they had a 'novel exploit' for gaining access to devices, that they were running a botnet-for-hire service, and — most alarmingly — that the operation was spending $30,000 a month on infrastructure, was 'not some rinky-dink operation,' and came with an explicit message: don't investigate us. For Ben, those three data points lit up like red flags, confirming that something far larger was going on.
When Ben Brundage wanted to keep a KimWolf-connected hacker talking without spooking them, he sent a cat GIF — a tuxedo-wearing cat meant to signal he wasn't taking things too seriously. It worked, and the hacker started sharing operational details about the botnet.
The hacker running the KimWolf botnet told Ben Brundage that the operation spent $30,000 a month on infrastructure.
One KimWolf DDoS attack was so large it was as if everyone in Germany, Spain, and the UK had visited the same website at the exact same second.
