Europol Now Going After People Who Bought DDoS-for-Hire Services

If you were a buyer of any online DDoS-for-hire service, you might be in trouble.

After taking down and arresting the operators of the world’s biggest DDoS-for-hire service last year, the authorities are now in hunt for customers who bought the service that helped cyber criminals launch millions of attacks against several banks, government institutions, and gaming industry.

Europol has announced that British police are conducting a number of live operations worldwide to track down the users of the infamous Webstresser.org service that the authorities dismantled in April 2018.

Launched in 2015, Webstresser let its customers rent the service for about £10 to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against their targets with little to no technical knowledge, which resulted in more than 4 million DDoS attacks.

According to the Europol announcement published on Monday, the agency gained access to the accounts of over 151,000 registered Webstresser users last year when it shut down the service and have now uncovered a “trove of information” against some users that could help the agency track them down.

Europol said more than 250 users of Webstresser and other DDoS-for-hire services will soon face potential prosecution for the damage they have caused.

images from Hacker News