Europol announced that an international law enforcement campaign known as Operation Power Off closed some fifty of the world’s biggest booter services, designed to enable users to launch crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), have been taken down as part of an international crackdown against DDoS service providers. Law enforcement in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany take action against these types of attacks which can paralyze the internet.
In our 5-year existence, FinTelegram has been the target of DDoS attacks dozens of times. In this respect, we are grateful that law enforcement agencies are finally taking action against it.
The services seized were by far the most popular DDoS booter services on the market, receiving top billing on search engines. One such service taken down had been used to carry out over 30 million attacks. As part of this action, seven administrators have been arrested so far in the US and the UK, with further actions planned against the users of these illegal services.
International police cooperation was central to the success of this operation as the administrators, users, critical infrastructure, and victims were scattered across the world. Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre coordinated European activities through its Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT).
This international sweep follows previous editions of Operation Power Off, which targeted the administrators and users of the DDoS marketplace webstresser.org.
