The U.S. and 20 other countries teamed up this week to take down dozens of websites behind cyberattack-for-hire services.
As part of an ongoing campaign dubbed Operation PowerOFF, authorities seized 53 web domains linked to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack “booter” services, which let users rent access to tools that temporarily cripple websites by overwhelming them with traffic. The participating governments also made four arrests, executed 25 search warrants to seize the booter services’ databases and sent more than 75,000 warning messages to the services’ customers.
“DDoS-for-hire is one of the most prolific and easily accessible trends in cybercrime, enabling individuals with little technical knowledge to follow step-by-step tutorials to execute criminal attacks,” Europol said. “These attacks inflict significant harm on businesses and individuals across the globe by targeting servers, websites, or online services and making them inaccessible to legitimate users.”
In the U.S., the Justice Department seized eight DDoS booter service domains and searched their databases, DOJ said in a statement, while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) teamed up with the Dutch National Police to place warning ads next to search-engine results for DDoS activities.
“DDoS services, such as those named in this action, allegedly attacked a wide array of victims in the United States and abroad, including schools, government agencies, gaming platforms, critical infrastructure, including Department of War resources, and millions of people,” DOJ said.
Federal prosecutors in Alaska and Los Angeles have charged at least 11 people with running DDoS booter services in the past four years, the government said.
As part of Operation PowerOFF, authorities have also convinced search engines to remove more than 100 URLs advertising DDoS booter sites and contacted users of those sites through the cryptocurrency platforms they used to pay for access.
The latest phase of the operation involved authorities in the U.S., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Thailand and the U.K.
Previous operations have involved dozens of website seizures and multiple arrests of service administrators.
