$30,000/month on infrastructure
The hacker running the KimWolf botnet told Ben Brundage that the operation spent $30,000 a month on infrastructure.
Snapshot · The Journal.
The College Student Who Defeated the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon
Explore episode
May 1, 2026
Where this was said
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.
The Cat Meme That Unlocked a Hacker
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.
One attack = entire Germany+Spain+UK
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.
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