Dutch police take down 15 DDoS services in a week
In a press release published today, Dutch police said they have successfully taken down 15 DDoS-for-hire services in the span of a week, as part of one of their most successful crackdowns against online DDoS service providers.
The DDoS-for-hire websites, also known as DDoS booters or DDoS stressors, allowed users to sign up and launch DDoS attacks against websites and other internet infrastructure.
Dutch authorities said the takedowns took place last week, and they received support from web hosting companies, domain registrars, Europol, Interpol, and the FBI.
Authorities did not release the name of the 15 DDoS services.
This is the second time in the past six months that Dutch police intervened against DDoS-for-hire services.
In October last year, Dutch authorities took down an entire web hosting company that provided hosting services and backend infrastructure to tens of DDoS botnets and booter services.
Dutch police also participated in an international crackdown against DDoS booters in December 2018, when the FBI and Europol spearheaded an effort that took down 15 DDoS booter services just ahead of Christmas, a time when most DDoS attacks are known to take place.
In addition to taking down the 15 DDoS services last week, Dutch police said they also made an arrest today. Authorities said they arrested a 19-year-old teen from the city of Breda for launching DDoS attacks against two Dutch government sites on March 20, this year.
Police said the teen attacked MijnOverheid.nl, a portal where Dutch citizens receive documents from the Dutch government, and Overheid.nl, a general-purpose government information portal.
The teen will be arraigned in a Dutch court in the coming days.