Fresh on the heels of an arresting alleged hacker Peter Levashov in Spain, the Department of Justice announced plans to disable a botnet – known as Kelihos – they claim was under his control and used to send spam emails and infect systems with ransomware. Acting assistant attorney-general Kenneth Blanco said the operation will "redirect Kelihos-infected computers to a substitute server", in order to block communications between infected devices and the botnet server, instead redirecting the compromised machines to the DOJ's own botnet servers. Levashov reportedly had been operating the botnet since 2010, and targeted computers running all variants of Microsoft Windows, the preferred target OS of botnet harvesters worldwide. The Department of Justice statement concluded by stating that "The US government will share samples of the malware with antivirus vendors in facilitate updates to their programs which will allow them to detect and remove Kelihos" while leaving government backdoors firmly in place.