A DDOS rental Website used to launch attacks against banks across the globe has been shut down following an investigation led by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Dutch National Police.
Authorities in five countries including the Netherlands, Serbia, Croatia and Canada, with support from Police Scotland and Europol, targeted six members of the crime group behind webstresser.org, seizing servers and effecting a takedown of the site earlier this morning.
Cyber criminals across the world have used the site, which could be rented for as little as $14.99, to launch in excess of four million crippling distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
NCA says the DDOS-for-hire service was used to target seven of the UK’s biggest banks in attacks in November 2017. They were forced to reduce operations or shut down entire systems, incurring costs in the hundreds of thousands to get services back up and running, says the crime-fighting agency.
Gert Ras, head of the National High Tech Crime Unit at the Dutch National Police says: “By taking down world’s largest illegal DDOS seller in a worldwide joint law enforcement operation based on NCA intelligence, we have made an unprecedented impact on DDOS cybercrime. Not only were the administrators of this illegal service arrested, but also users will now face prosecution and civil liability for caused damage."