FBI takes down some ‘DDoS for hire’ websites just before Christmas

2 min read

This Thursday a California federal judge granted warrants to the FBI to take down several websites providing DDoS attack services.

The domains have been seized by the FBI just before Christmas Holidays. This is a season where hackers have done DDoS attacks in the past. The attacks are mainly targeted towards gaming services like PlayStation Network, Xbox, Steam, EA Online, etc.

According to the document, these 15 ‘booter’ websites were taken down:

anonsecurityteam.com
critical-boot.com
defianceprotocol.com
ragebooter.come.
str3ssed.me
bullstresser.net
quantumstress.net
booter.ninja
downthem.org
netstress.org
Torsecurityteam.org
Vbooter.org
defcon.pro
request.rip
layer7-stresser.xyz

According to the filed affidavits, three men were charged, Matthew Gatrel, 30 and Juan Martinez, 25 from California; and David Bukoski, 23 from Alaska, for operating the websites. U.K.’s National Crime Agency, Netherlands Police, and the Department of Justice, USA along with companies like Cloudflare, Flashpoint, and Google have made joint efforts for the takedown. This takedown will most likely soon follow with arrests.

As per the affidavit, some of these sites were capable of attacks exceeding 40 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s), enough to render some websites dead for a long time.

Hackers have stated previously to the Telegraph that the rationale behind attacks on gaming websites on Christmas season is about the holiday spirit. They say that Christmas is not about “children sitting in their rooms and playing games, it is about spending time with their families.”

What is a DDoS attack?

DDoS attacks have long been a problem dating back to the 70’s. An attacker infects and uses multiple machines to target a network service and flood it with packets of useless data so that legitimate users are denied service. The goal of these attacks is to temporarily make the target services unavailable to its users.

This story was initially reported by TechCrunch.