Operation PowerOFF: 75K Users of DDoS-for-Hire Services Identified and Warned

Operation PowerOFF identifies and warns 75K users of DDoS-for-hire services, nets 4 arrests, and seizes 53 domains in a Europol-led crackdown...

Akamai Helps Authorities Disrupt the World’s Largest IoT Botnets

The U.S. DOJ recently disrupted several large and powerful DDoS botnets and shut down their related DDoS-for-hire services with Akamai’s help...

U.S. Authorities Seize 13 Domains Offering Criminal DDoS-for-Hire Services

U.S. authorities have announced the seizure of 13 internet domains that offered DDoS-for-hire services to other criminal actors. The takedown is part of an ongoing international initiative dubbed Operation PowerOFF that's aimed at dismantling criminal DDoS-for-hire infrastructures worldwide. The...

Thinking of Hiring or Running a Booter Service? Think Again.

Most people who operate DDoS-for-hire businesses attempt to hide their true identities and location. Proprietors of these so-called "booter" or "stresser" services -- designed to knock websites and users offline -- have long operated in a legally murky area of cybercrime law. But until recently,...

"Untraceable" surveillance firm sued for scraping Facebook and Instagram data

Days after Meta achieved victory after suing the NSO Group for Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges, Meta filed a lawsuit against surveillance company Voyager Labs for violations of its Terms and Policies and California law. According to court documents, Voyager Labs created 38,000 fake accounts ...

Hack-for-Hire Group Targets Travel and Financial Entities with New Janicab Malware Variant

Travel agencies have emerged as the target of a hack-for-hire group dubbed Evilnum as part of a broader campaign aimed at legal and financial investment institutions in the Middle East and Europe. The attacks, which took place during 2020 and 2021 and likely went as far back as 2015, involved a...

Dark Web Pricing Skyrockets for Microsoft RDP Servers, Payment-Card Data

Cybercriminals are vying for Remote Desktop Protocol RDP access, stolen payment cards and DDoS-for-Hire services, based on a recent analysis of underground marketplace pricing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals have profited with “increasingly advantageous positions to benefit from the...

DDoS attacks in Q3 2019

News overview This past quarter we observed a new DDoS attack that confirmed our earlier hypothesis regarding attacks through the Memcached protocol. As we surmised, the attackers attempted to use another, rather exotic protocol to amplify DDoS attacks. Experts at Akamai Technologies recently...

ThreatList: DDoS Attack Sizes Drop 85 Percent Post FBI Crackdown

The average size of distributed denial of service DDoS attacks decreased significantly, dropping by 85 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018. Researchers with NexusGuard said in a Tuesday report shared with Threatpost, that the number of DDoS attacks also dipped significantly, sinking by almost 1...

Researchers Tracking Emerging Darkness Botnet

Researchers are tracking a new botnet that has become one of the more active DDoS networks on the Internet since its emergence early last month. The botnet, dubbed “Darkness,” is being controlled by several domains hosted in Russia and its operators are boasting that it can take down large sites...