Europol has just struck another major blow against cybercriminals orchestrating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In a press release, the European police announced that they had shut down six on-demand DDoS platforms. They allowed any hacker to pay to launch a DDoS attack against a website server.
The six forcibly shut down platforms, namely Cfxapi, Cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown, and zapcut, are described by Europol as the "empire" of on-demand DDoS. Law enforcement officials say the tools were used to carry out thousands of cyberattacks against schools, government agencies, businesses, and gaming platforms between 2022 and 2025. A quartet of hackers were arrested. As part of the operation, which was carried out with the support of authorities in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States, four hackers suspected of running the DDoS platforms were arrested. The criminals were taken into custody in Poland. Nine different domain names were subsequently seized. Dutch investigators posted fake DDoS-for-hire sites to trap hackers looking for a criminal tool. On these fake sites, authorities remind users that this type of activity is illegal, monitored, and can lead to prosecution.
Law enforcement has been conducting ongoing actions against DDoS attacks for years. This police offensive is a direct result of Operation PowerOFF, which has been ongoing since 2018. This "international crackdown" initiative already resulted in the seizure of 27 very popular DDoS sites last Christmas. Last summer, police also dismantled DigitalStress, another "DDoS-for-hire" platform. Over the years, more than 100 criminal sites have been shut down by investigators.
These attacks come as the number of DDoS attacks is on the rise worldwide. During the first quarter of the year, Cloudflare blocked more than twenty million cyberattacks, including one offensive of record intensity.
Source: Europol
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