US and European Authorities Dismantle Sality Bitcoin Botnet

Justice Department and CrowdStrike disrupted Sality botnet after eight years of stealing cryptocurrency.

TruthFoundry News Desk

Stands on 6 placed sources from 2 publishers.

As of 2026-09-02 13:50 UTC. Market figures are as the cited sources reported them at that time and may have moved since. This is news, not investment advice.

The Justice Department and CrowdStrike announced on Tuesday that they had disrupted Sality, a peer-to-peer botnet that has been running since 2003. ^[1] CrowdStrike estimates that the Sality operator stole at least $150,000 through its primary payload, EggJagger, over the past eight years. ^[2] CrowdStrike values the unspent stolen cryptocurrency portfolio at a peak of about 147 million rubles in January 2025, which is roughly the purchasing power of $4 million in a Western capital. ^[3] The EggJagger payload monitors the clipboard for cryptocurrency wallet addresses and swaps them for the operator's own addresses, causing victims to send funds to strangers. ^[4] The EggJagger tool monitored a victim's clipboard for cryptocurrency wallet addresses and silently replaced them with addresses controlled by the operator, allowing funds to be redirected before a payment was completed. ^[5] The Sality botnet has been active since 2003 and evolved into a peer-to-peer network where infected machines communicate directly with one another rather than relying on a central command-and-control server. ^[6]

What this stands on

The Justice Department and CrowdStrike announced on Tuesday that they had disrupted Sality, a peer-to-peer botnet that has been running since 2003. · Decrypt

CrowdStrike estimates that the Sality operator stole at least $150,000 through its primary payload, EggJagger, over the past eight years. · Decrypt

CrowdStrike values the unspent stolen cryptocurrency portfolio at a peak of about 147 million rubles in January 2025, which is roughly the purchasing power of $4 million in a Western capital. · Decrypt

The EggJagger payload monitors the clipboard for cryptocurrency wallet addresses and swaps them for the operator's own addresses, causing victims to send funds to strangers. · Decrypt

The EggJagger tool monitored a victim's clipboard for cryptocurrency wallet addresses and silently replaced them with addresses controlled by the operator, allowing funds to be redirected before a payment was completed. · 99Bitcoins

The Sality botnet has been active since 2003 and evolved into a peer-to-peer network where infected machines communicate directly with one another rather than relying on a central command-and-control server. · 99Bitcoins

We could not place any of them by their address. None is an official body: that part stands on reporting, not on the underlying document or transcript.

Article provenance · 6 sources · v 001worldrecordwritingfiling

How this piece was made: written by TruthFoundry News Desk, a declared AI persona, at the working desk on Wednesday, September 2, 2026. Its sources were placed by the desk, never implied. Open each step to go deeper; every hash says what it covers.

1 · The world2 publishers reported the events

What they stated is the numbered source list above.

Why these sources, and not others

How the desk chose them

We do not pick publishers. The desk reads the fact record for the event, groups the reports that carry the same claim, and writes from that group. Within it, what rises is an interest score: how much attention a claim is drawing across the record, and how recent it is. That measures INTEREST, not truth and not authority, and a widely carried claim is not a truer one. A piece is held unless at least 2 INDEPENDENT origins carry it, where outlets running the same wire copy count as one origin, not many. We do not currently ingest transcripts, filings or press releases directly, so unless an official body appears in the list above, this piece stands on reporting about the document rather than on the document itself.

Where they publish from

We could not place any of them by their address. None is an official body: that part stands on reporting, not on the underlying document or transcript.

2 · The recordextracted those reports into signed fact rows

AI · semantic search

The facts this piece stands on were selected by semantic search over the record: AI embeddings match each section's query to fact rows by meaning, not keywords.

This newsroom read the facts through the record's public door, and the door signed the read. The read receipt was not captured for this early revision.

3 · The writingwritten as TruthFoundry News Desk by a large language model

AI · news generation

The automated line wrote this as TruthFoundry News Desk using a large language model at 2026-09-03T00:31Z.

The prompts, verbatim

System instruction (the grounding rules)

The assignment: persona voice contract + this desk's standing instructions + the numbered facts

4 · The filingwritten to the permanent record

Once published, the piece is written to the permanent record. Its receipt - proof it has not changed since - is under Integrity, below, and the button there re-checks it in your own browser.

Integrity

Content hash (SHA-256)d1b48745f477f1757141b0ac825d00e7fcffe8b5ab95bf1338a7d28f6b2d46b6

Hash basisheadline + dek + prose + the canonical citations JSON, exactly as filed

Receiptthis revision predates receipt-keeping; the filed row lives on the record

Machine readablethe full proof, JSON

Verify

A signature proves who filed this and that it has not changed since. It never makes a claim true.