Paid DDOS attack services fall after police intervention


Europol, the US Department of Justice and several police departments announce that they have neutralized several paying services to carry out DDOS attacks. Arrests took place.

“Power-Off”. This is the name given to the international police operation aimed at obtaining the seizure of several domain names linked to “DDOS-as-a-service”. Behind this obscure jargon hide criminal services that are used to launch computer attacks against an individual or a website, in order to hinder their access to the Internet.

This operation, announced on December 14, 2022 by the United States Department of Justice, is the result of a cooperation that involved law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Germany, and in the Netherlands, but also Europol and private sector partners, such as Google, Cloudflare, Yahoo, Oracle, Akamai, PayPal and others.

The kind of warning visible in the event of a domain name seizure by the American authorities. // Source: Europol

The seizure of domain names consists in depriving the incriminated sites of the address which they used until now to be referenced, to make themselves known and to be visited by their customers. Instead of the home page, a law enforcement warning message. Everything else becomes inaccessible. It is a recurring process, which is also used against illicit streaming and piracy.

A DDOS attack, an acronym for distributed denial of service attack, is a relatively common hostile act on the net. It consists of overwhelming a target with a very large number of connection requests. As a result, the server is overwhelmed and can no longer process other requests, which are legitimate. The server-dependent service then becomes unavailable.

Services that have been used for attacks in large numbers

The principle of DDOS-as-a-service consists in creating an economic model around DDOS attacks: platforms are set up and offer to carry out actions against the targets of their choice, for remuneration. This provides leverage that was previously inaccessible to people with low computer skills. But it is an illicit service.

Illegal, but very popular. In the Europol press release, one of the sites – which is not mentioned – is accused of having been used to carry out more than 30 million attacks. A gigantic number for only one of the fifty targets of Operation Power Off – which takes the same name as a similar operation which took place in the spring of 2018.

These services ” allegedly attacked a wide range of victims in the United States and abroad, including schools, government agencies, gaming platforms and millions of people “, according to the US Department. 1″ These attacks can significantly degrade online services and completely disrupt Internet connections. »

As part of Operation Power Off, seven people were arrested – six in the United States and one in the United Kingdom – reports Europol. Criminal proceedings have already been initiated against the individuals arrested across the Atlantic. These seven suspects nevertheless remain presumed innocent pending the verdict of their trial.

The TechCrunch site, however, noted that after the announcement by US authorities, some sites did not appear to be entirely offline. This was the case for eight sites in particular. A transitional situation, according to the Department of Justice, because there may be a delay before seeing the warning from the police. And even if these sites still seem online, they can no longer operate.



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