Authorities Taken Down Bulletproof Hosting Provider Lolek

The well-known bulletproof hosting platform, Lolek Hosted, has been shut down by law enforcement officials from the United States and Poland to limit fraudsters’ access to tools that enable anonymous online behavior.

These platforms give hackers anonymity and are frequently used for malicious activities like malware distribution and assisting cyberattacks.

The FBI and IRS displayed a banner on the <Lolek>Hosted website as early as Tuesday.

“This domain has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigation as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against Lolek Hosted,” the banner said.

Since 2009, Hosted is a well-known bulletproof hosting service with headquarters in the UK and a data center in Europe. The website is frequently mentioned in stories regarding anonymous hosting services.

While promising to secure their clients’ identities, bulletproof hosting providers turn a blind eye to the content that users publish. 

These businesses are notorious for renting out IP addresses, servers, and domains to criminals who use them to spread malware, build up botnet armies, and do other activities connected to fraud and cyberattacks.

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Sentencing Individuals Involved in Bulletproof Hosting Service

U.S. law enforcement has made a point of going after the operators of bulletproof hosting firms in recent years, bringing individuals responsible and imposing severe penalties.

The United States Department of Justice sentenced Mihai Ionut Paunescu, 39, to three years in federal prison in June for his assistance in managing the bulletproof hosting company PowerHost[.]ro.

Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, and Aleksandr Shorodumov, 33, of Lithuania were both sentenced to more than two years in prison for running a bulletproof hosting company that assisted in launching attacks against U.S. targets between 2009 and 2015. 

Aleksandr Grichishkin, a Russian national, received a five-year sentence in 2021 for founding and running a bulletproof hosting business.

A 33-year-old resident of Illinois was also given a prison term for owning and running the DDoS facilitation websites DownThem.org and AmpNode.com, which also offered users bulletproof server hosting.

Hence, reports say authorities from the US and Poland worked together to seize Lolek Hosted. 

This confiscation is a result of US authorities’ aggressive efforts over the past few years to stop the operations of bulletproof hosting services, which have been mostly successful, with major successes including jail terms for important operators of these platforms.

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