Europol has introduced the takedown of distributed denial of service (DDoS)-for-hire providers that had been used to launch hundreds of cyber-attacks the world over.
In reference to the operation, Polish authorities have arrested 4 people and the USA has seized 9 domains which can be related to the now-defunct platforms.
“The suspects are believed to be behind six separate stresser/booter providers that enabled paying clients to flood web sites and servers with malicious site visitors — knocking them offline for as little as EUR 10,” Europol mentioned in a press release.
The providers, named cfxapi, cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown and zapcut, are mentioned to have been instrumental in launching widespread assaults on faculties, authorities providers, companies, and gaming platforms between 2022 and 2025.
Europol mentioned the platforms supplied “slick consumer interfaces,” enabling malicious actors with little to no technical experience to orchestrate DDoS assaults by merely getting into a goal IP tackle, selecting the kind of assault, and paying a price.
Stresser providers, sometimes marketed on underground boards, are sometimes disguised as reliable stress-testing instruments however are designed to disrupt entry to net sources by letting their clients unleash a flood of faux site visitors towards a goal web site, making them inaccessible to actual customers.
“Not like conventional botnets, which require the management of huge numbers of contaminated gadgets, stresser/booter providers industrialise DDoS assaults by centralised, rented infrastructure,” Europol famous.
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In keeping with snapshots captured on the Web Archive, cfxsecurity, hosted on the domains cfxsecurity[.]wager and “cfxsecurity.cc,” marketed itself because the “#1 stress testing service” and that it supplied “complete stress take a look at, making certain your web site and providers are able to climate any storm.”
The service supplied three plans, Starter for $20/month, Premium for $50/month, and Enterprise for $130/month. QuickDown (“quickdown[.]professional”), likewise, priced its package for wherever between $20/month to $379/month.
Cloud safety firm Radware, in a report printed in August 2024, revealed that QuickDown is amongst a brand new crop of stresser providers which have adopted a hybrid structure combining each botnets and devoted servers. QuickDown is claimed to have launched a “Botnet addon and new plans associated to the Botnet community” in September 2023.
The newest motion, carried out in collaboration with Dutch and German authorities, is a part of an ongoing effort referred to as Operation PowerOFF that goals to dismantle infrastructure facilitating DDoS-for-hire exercise.
In December 2024, a set of 27 stresser providers had been taken offline, alongside saying expenses towards six completely different people within the Netherlands and the U.S.