Wellington, NEW ZEALAND — Compromised devices that were part of a “botnet” controlled by a Chinese company have been found in New Zealand, leading our spy agency to join international partners in calling out “malicious cyber agencies”.

Intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes nations yesterday released a notice  saying cyber actors linked to China “have compromised thousands of internet-connected devices”, including small office or home routers and firewalls.

This was done to create a “botnet”, which is a network of compromised devices that can be controlled for malicious purposes. This could include malware delivery or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, where networks are flooded with traffic to take them offline.

The notice says a China-based company with links to the Chinese Government has controlled the botnet since mid-2021 and, as of June this year, it consisted of more than 260,000 devices.

The GCSB’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) confirmed compromised devices have been observed in New Zealand.