Europol and law enforcement agencies from 13 countries around the globe have arrested 34 users of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyber-attack tools and warned 101 suspects in a major crackdown.
Authorities from Australia, Belgium, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States carried out the coordinated action from December 05-December 09.
Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) supported the countries in their efforts to identify suspects in the EU and beyond, mainly young adults under the age of 20, by hosting operational meetings, collating intelligence and providing analytical support. During the raid, different suspects were interviewed, detained and arrested or fined, notifications were sent to parents and house searches were conducted.
Those arrested are accused of paying for DDoS tools like stressers and booters services which flood websites and web servers with a massive amount of data, leaving them inaccessible to users.
Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) supported the law enforcement agencies in their efforts to identify suspects in the European Union and beyond.
Since the emergence of Mirai IoT botnet, there has been a noticeable increase in DDoS attacks.
The authorities urged teenagers to use their skills for good and quit conducting DDoS attacks.
Steven Wilson, Head of EC3, commented: “One of the key priorities of law enforcement should be to engage with these young people to prevent them from pursuing a criminal path, helping them understand how they can use their skills for a more constructive purpose.”
The raids came after European Commission Servers and Deutsche Telekom suffered a series of massive DDoS attack a couple of weeks ago.
