Dutch police just pulled the plug on a botnet made up of 17 million devices — phones, laptops, routers and smart gadgets — by seizing the 200 servers that controlled it, as reported by Help Net Security. Seventeen million. So what actually is a botnet? It’s a network of everyday internet-connected devices that have been quietly infected and are now controlled remotely by someone else — a “robot network”. The owners usually have no idea. Each device carries on working normally while also taking orders in the background.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit for business owners: your gear can be conscripted without a single obvious symptom. An unpatched office router, a cheap security camera, a staff member’s home PC running some “free” software that came bundled with hidden extras — any of these can be roped in. Once they are, your internet connection gets used for someone else’s dirty work: launching attacks on other companies, sending spam, stuffing stolen passwords into login pages, or committing ad fraud. In this case the hijacked devices were resold as “residential proxies”, which let criminals route attacks through ordinary home and business IP addresses precisely because that traffic looks trustworthy and is hard to block.

The practical takeaway is simple. Botnets feed on the devices everyone forgets — routers, IP cameras, NAS boxes, old phones — so those are exactly the things to keep patched, restart occasionally, and never leave running on default passwords. Be wary of “free” apps and browser extensions that seem a little too generous; some pay for themselves by quietly selling your bandwidth. And if a device suddenly runs hot, slow, or chews through data for no clear reason, treat that as a red flag worth investigating rather than a quirk to ignore.

Most of this comes down to basic hygiene done consistently — patching, sensible passwords, and someone actually keeping an eye on the network. That’s the bread and butter of managed cybersecurity, and it’s a great deal cheaper than discovering your business was an unwitting launchpad for an attack on someone else.