An international operation supported by Europol has disrupted the Sality peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet, a long-running criminal infrastructure used to spread malicious payloads to thousands of infected computers. The coordinated action took place on 31 August 2026. It was led by US authorities and targeted a botnet believed to have been operating for more than two decades. According to the operation’s organisers, the Sality botnet was used to deliver malware across large numbers of compromised devices worldwide. The disruption forms part of efforts to interrupt criminal systems used to scale cyberattacks by controlling how malicious code is distributed. While details of the technical takedown and its wider operational impact were not included in the available information, the announcement describes the operation as a public-private effort and highlights the botnet’s durability, including that it had been active for about two decades. The case was reported by Europol in connection with its support for international coordination against cybercrime infrastructure.