Polish authorities have detained four suspects linked to six DDoS-for-hire platforms, believed to have facilitated thousands of attacks targeting schools, government services, businesses, and gaming platforms worldwide since 2022.
Such platforms are often marketed as legitimate testing tools on the dark web and hacking forums, but are mainly used to disrupt online services, servers, and websites by flooding them with traffic in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and causing outages for real users.
The six DDoS services, named Cfxapi, Cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown, and zapcut, have been taken down in a coordinated law enforcement action involving authorities from Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States.
"In the latest blow to the criminal market for distributed denial of service (DDoS)-for-hire services, Polish authorities have arrested four individuals who allegedly ran a network of platforms used to launch thousands of cyberattacks worldwide," Europol said on Wednesday.
"The suspects are believed to be behind six separate stresser/booter services that enabled paying customers to flood websites and servers with malicious traffic — knocking them offline for as little as EUR 10."
