An international law enforcement operation targeting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) services has led to the takedown of 27 websites and the arrest of three suspects.
Referred to as booter or stresser services, these platforms allowed miscreants to launch DDoS attacks against websites and other web-based services to render them unusable.
On Wednesday, Europol announced the takedown of zdstresser.net, orbitalstress.net, starkstresser.net, and other booter websites, as well as the arrest of three alleged administrators of DDoS-for-hire services in France and Germany, and the identification of more than 300 individuals who used these services.
As part of the investigation into these services, Dutch police identified roughly 200 suspects, including one allegedly responsible for launching over 4,000 DDoS attacks, and three people believed to have carried out hundreds of assaults.
The four suspects, men aged between 22 and 26 years old, are from Rijen, Voorhout, Lelystad, and Barneveld. Ten more suspects will be brought in for questioning and more arrests are expected as the investigation continues, Dutch police said.
Law enforcement agencies in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Romania, UK, and the US, coordinated by Europol, participated in the operation, known as Operation PowerOff.
“The festive season has long been a peak period for hackers to carry out some of their most disruptive DDoS attacks, causing severe financial loss, reputational damage, and operational chaos for their victims. The motivations for launching such attacks vary, from economic sabotage and financial gain to ideological reasons,” Europol said.
For the better part of the last decade, law enforcement agencies around the world have been cracking down on DDoS-for-hire services as part of Operation PowerOff, which has led to the disruption of Webstresser, DigitalStress, Stresser.tech, and many others.
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