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COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Central Ohio city and county leaders have said multiple times in recent months that domestic violence is on the rise in the area. That’s why the Franklin County Commissioners and City of Grace Church teamed up Wednesday night for a conversation on healthy relationships. “Domestic violence is always an issue; it [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- The newest season of Netflix's hit dating series “Love is Blind” premiered Wednesday and, for the first time, central Ohio is front and center. "Columbus is a great city, and it doesn't get enough credi,t so now the whole world can see how amazing this city is," fan Melissa Hilton said.  [...]

Joel butters his own popcorn.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther revealed the spending framework planned for the $500 million affordable housing bond package approved by Columbus voters in November 2025. “Columbus is making one of the largest municipal bonds in affordable housing in the country,” he said. “To our knowledge, only New York City and San Francisco [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Love is in the air this time of year, but detectives say scammers use that to their advantage. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office wants to warn people about romance scams. Franklin County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Bill Duffer said scammers build fake online relationships on dating apps and social media, then, when [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- A discussion on the state of childcare Wednesday addressed tackling the affordability crisis of childcare. NBC4's Jennifer Bullock moderated the Columbus Metropolitan Club Panel, highlighting the impact the rising cost of childcare not only has on families, but on providers as well. Groundwork Ohio says childcare can cost between $10,000 and [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Suspected hypothermia is believed to have contributed to six deaths amid a recent cold stretch in central Ohio, according to the Franklin County Coroner's Office. Four men and two women died between Jan. 24 and Feb. 2 across parts of Franklin County. Two of the deaths occurred inside of a residence [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- The sixth day of the winter Olympics promises to be one of the most anticipated for Team USA. After bringing the medal total to double-digits on Wednesday, one of the biggest American stars has a chance for a historic third straight gold medal. And after over a decade of waiting, we [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- A new study from The James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State is showing promising results for improving precise tumor removal in complex cancer patients.   Head and neck cancer surgeon Dr. Kyle VanKoevering and his team of engineers and researchers are using patients’ tumor imaging to create exact 3D printed models to improve the ability to remove cancer completely.   [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- A new bipartisan bill in the Ohio Senate would prohibit marriage for anyone under the age of 18, with no exceptions. The last time the age limit was set was 2019, and that law still allowed 17-year-olds to get married with parental consent and court-mandated counseling. Now, Ohio Sens. Bill DeMora [...]

A court ruled Wednesday that billionaire Les Wexner must be deposed in a case surrounding former Ohio State doctor Richard Strauss' decades of sexual abuse.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — An Ohio State University faculty member has been placed on leave after reportedly striking a cameraman who was attempting an on-campus interview. According to a video posted on social media, a man holding a video camera was attempting to interview former university president Gordon Gee in the hallway of the Chase [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- According to campaign finance records, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy received more in total donations from Ohioans, and Democrat Amy Acton had more individual Ohioan donors. Ramaswamy and Acton are the front-runners for November's gubernatorial election, and both set fundraising records in their first year of campaigning. At $19.8 million by Dec. 31, [...]

For the past week, the massive “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet known as Kimwolf has been disrupting The Invisible Internet Project (I2P), a decentralized, encrypted communications network designed to anonymize and secure online communications. I2P users started reporting disruptions in the network around the same time the Kimwolf botmasters began relying on it to evade takedown attempts against the botnet’s control servers.

Kimwolf is a botnet that surfaced in late 2025 and quickly infected millions of systems, turning poorly secured IoT devices like TV streaming boxes, digital picture frames and routers into relays for malicious traffic and abnormally large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

I2P is a decentralized, privacy-focused network that allows people to communicate and share information anonymously.

“It works by routing data through multiple encrypted layers across volunteer-operated nodes, hiding both the sender’s and receiver’s locations,” the I2P website explains. “The result is a secure, censorship-resistant network designed for private websites, messaging, and data sharing.”

On February 3, I2P users began complaining on the organization’s GitHub page about tens of thousands of routers suddenly overwhelming the network, preventing existing users from communicating with legitimate nodes. Users reported a rapidly increasing number of new routers joining the network that were unable to transmit data, and that the mass influx of new systems had overwhelmed the network to the point where users could no longer connect.

I2P users complaining about service disruptions from a rapidly increasing number of routers suddenly swamping the network.

When one I2P user asked whether the network was under attack, another user replied, “Looks like it. My physical router freezes when the number of connections exceeds 60,000.”

A graph shared by I2P developers showing a marked drop in successful connections on the I2P network around the time the Kimwolf botnet started trying to use the network for fallback communications.

The same day that I2P users began noticing the outages, the individuals in control of Kimwolf posted to their Discord channel that they had accidentally disrupted I2P after attempting to join 700,000 Kimwolf-infected bots as nodes on the network.

The Kimwolf botmaster openly discusses what they are doing with the botnet in a Discord channel with my name on it.

Although Kimwolf is known as a potent weapon for launching DDoS attacks, the outages caused this week by some portion of the botnet attempting to join I2P are what’s known as a “Sybil attack,” a threat in peer-to-peer networks where a single entity can disrupt the system by creating, controlling, and operating a large number of fake, pseudonymous identities.

Indeed, the number of Kimwolf-infected routers that tried to join I2P this past week was many times the network’s normal size. I2P’s Wikipedia page says the network consists of roughly 55,000 computers distributed throughout the world, with each participant acting as both a router (to relay traffic) and a client.

However, Lance James, founder of the New York City based cybersecurity consultancy Unit 221B and the original founder of I2P, told KrebsOnSecurity the entire I2P network now consists of between 15,000 and 20,000 devices on any given day.

An I2P user posted this graph on Feb. 10, showing tens of thousands of routers — mostly from the United States — suddenly attempting to join the network.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services and was the first to document Kimwolf’s unique spreading techniques. Brundage said the Kimwolf operator(s) have been trying to build a command and control network that can’t easily be taken down by security companies and network operators that are working together to combat the spread of the botnet.

Brundage said the people in control of Kimwolf have been experimenting with using I2P and a similar anonymity network — Tor — as a backup command and control network, although there have been no reports of widespread disruptions in the Tor network recently.

“I don’t think their goal is to take I2P down,” he said. “It’s more they’re looking for an alternative to keep the botnet stable in the face of takedown attempts.”

The Kimwolf botnet created challenges for Cloudflare late last year when it began instructing millions of infected devices to use Cloudflare’s domain name system (DNS) settings, causing control domains associated with Kimwolf to repeatedly usurp Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites.

James said the I2P network is still operating at about half of its normal capacity, and that a new release is rolling out which should bring some stability improvements over the next week for users.

Meanwhile, Brundage said the good news is Kimwolf’s overlords appear to have quite recently alienated some of their more competent developers and operators, leading to a rookie mistake this past week that caused the botnet’s overall numbers to drop by more than 600,000 infected systems.

“It seems like they’re just testing stuff, like running experiments in production,” he said. “But the botnet’s numbers are dropping significantly now, and they don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

DUBLIN, Ohio (WCMH) -- Dublin City Council voted unanimously Monday to continue hosting the city's annual Halloween Spooktacular as a two-day event, opting to maintain the expanded format adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic rather than returning to a single day. Councilmembers briefly discussed the possibility of reducing the event to one day, as it had [...]

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WCMH) — Former Ohio State linebacker Darron Lee appeared before a Tennessee judge Wednesday after being charged with first-degree murder. Lee, a five-year NFL veteran and former champion with the Buckeyes in 2014, is charged with murder and tampering with evidence after a woman believed to be Lee’s girlfriend was found dead at [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Bipartisan Ohio lawmakers are reviving an effort to regulate pricing algorithms, software that often uses artificial intelligence to adjust prices, rent and wages in order to maximize a company's profits. House Bill 665, introduced last month by Reps. Christine Cockley (D-Columbus) and Tex Fischer (R-Boardman), would prohibit such algorithms that collect [...]

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Love is officially in the air. Ohioans can now watch their fellow residents embark on dates on "Love Is Blind," including one contestant who discussed her experience with NBC4. The first six episodes of Season 10 — which is based in Ohio — dropped on Netflix at 3 a.m. The episodes [...]

Zoox, an autonomous ride-hailing company owned by Amazon, has been testing its retrofitted SUVs in Columbus, Ohio, to learn from the city's varied weather conditions.

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (WCMH) -- Department of Homeland Security officials said they did not have concrete plans to launch immigration enforcement efforts in Springfield, but plan to deport Haitian immigrants if migrants lose their protected status. District Judge Ana Reyes required the Department of Homeland Security to inform the court by Tuesday whether it planned immigration [...]