Europol announces the closure of a major DDoS-for-hire network
- Europol’s Operation PowerOFF has brought down DoS networks
- The global operation involved law enforcement agencies from 15 countries
- The PowerOFF operation led to the arrest of three site administrators and the identification of 300 DDoS site users
Europol has disabled 27 ‘booster’ and ‘stressor’ networks used to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in a global operation involving 15 countries.
The operation, codenamed PowerOFF, targeted botnet-for-hire websites including orbitalstress.net, zdstresser.net and starkstresser.net.
Three arrests were made against site administrators causing stress, with more than 300 site users identified by law enforcement.
DDoS sites removed
PowerOFF’s main mission was to break the “holiday tradition for cybercriminals” of attacking websites in the run-up to Christmas, which can cause “serious financial losses, reputational damage and operational chaos for their victims.”
“These platforms allowed cybercriminals and hacktivists to flood their targets with illegal traffic, making websites and other web-based services inaccessible,” Europol said. statement said.
A statement of the Dutch Police says that four suspects between the ages of 22 and 26 are being prosecuted for their involvement in hundreds of DDoS attacks.
Europol and other law enforcement agencies have stepped up their efforts to tackle DDoS networks, with the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disabling the Digitalstress booster site – widely recognized as the world’s largest DDoS site pre-takedown.
Europol also disrupted hundreds of servers used to distribute a cracked version of the Cobalt Strike pentest software earlier this year in a combined operation involving law enforcement officials from Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, UK, US, Bulgaria, Estonia and Finland were involved. , Lithuania, Japan and South Korea that targeted 690 IP addresses in 27 countries.
Additionally, CloudStrike released data showing that it recently disrupted the world’s largest DDoS attack in September 2024, peaking at 3.8 Tbps.
