FBI Evicts Russian GRU Spies from U.S. Routers in Major Cyber Operation
The FBI has successfully executed a remote patching operation on thousands of privately owned routers in the U.S. to remove malicious DNS resolvers installed by Russian military intelligence, known as GRU. This operation, named Operation Masquerade, was conducted with court authorization and aimed to evict Russian spies who had been harvesting passwords and authentication tokens from compromised devices. The routers, manufactured by TP-Link and Mikrotik, were exploited by GRU to redirect user traffic to sites that could capture sensitive data. The FBI's intervention replaced these malicious resolvers with legitimate ones provided by internet service providers, effectively cutting off GRU's access. The operation was part of a broader effort to counter Russian cyber threats, with over 18,000 routers affected by the campaign. 
