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Google has taken down key infrastructure behind a botnet called Popa that quietly hijacked millions of consumer TV streaming devices and turned them into hidden relay points for cybercriminals and state-linked espionage groups. Working alongside the FBI and Lumen Technologies, Google traced the operation to NetNut, an Israeli company that sells residential proxy services allowing customers to route their internet traffic through IP addresses in different countries, and found that NetNut’s network spanned at least 2 million devices scattered across the globe.

What makes this case especially serious is the scale of who was using it. Google’s investigation identified 316 distinct threat clusters relying on suspected NetNut proxy exit nodes, a group that included both financially motivated cybercriminals and espionage operations, all of whom were reportedly using the service to mask their real IP addresses while breaking into victim networks, accessing their own attack infrastructure, and running password spray attacks designed to guess their way into accounts. According to Google, NetNut built this network by embedding software development kits into devices commonly found in ordinary homes, especially smart TVs and streaming boxes, giving the company a hidden foothold to relay traffic through those devices without the owners ever knowing their hardware was being used this way.

In response, Google shut down the Google accounts and services that NetNut depended on to control the botnet, cutting off a key piece of the infrastructure keeping the operation running. This is not an isolated incident either; Google disrupted a similar residential proxy network called IPIDEA back in January, which it described at the time as the world’s largest, and it has been waging a broader legal and technical campaign against these networks since at least mid-2025, when it filed suit against the operators behind the BadBox 2.0 botnet affecting more than 10 million Android-based devices. Together, these actions point to a growing, largely invisible market where ordinary consumer electronics are quietly repurposed as cover for global hacking and espionage campaigns.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 29, 2026 in Trump v. Slaughter that President Trump had the constitutional authority to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 91-year-old precedent from 1935 that had protected members of independent federal agencies from presidential removal without cause for nearly a century. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion joined by all five conservative justices, stating that limits on the president’s ability to remove those who exercise executive power on his behalf unconstitutionally infringe on his Article II authority, and that the president may remove his subordinates at will. Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the rare and pointed step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench, a move justices reserve for decisions they consider historically significant and profoundly wrong.

The ruling applies to roughly two dozen independent federal agencies whose leaders previously served fixed terms and could only be removed for cause. The FTC, NLRB, SEC, CFPB, and Federal Reserve Board of Governors are all now subject to at-will presidential removal under the ruling, giving President Trump and every future president direct control over agencies that regulate Wall Street, consumer protection, antitrust enforcement, labor relations, and the broader financial system. Legal scholars describe the ruling as the culmination of the unitary executive theory, the legal doctrine holding that a president must have total control over all executive branch functions, and say it represents the most significant expansion of presidential power over the regulatory state in modern American history.

In a separate ruling issued the same day, the Court drew a distinction and held that Trump could not fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, though the legal reasoning behind that carve-out is still being analyzed by constitutional scholars and its precise limits remain unclear. Trump celebrated the Slaughter ruling publicly, saying it “greatly increases” his presidential power. The immediate practical effect is that no commissioner, board member, or director of an independent federal agency can now consider themselves protected from removal if they make a decision the White House opposes.