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.

Lolek Hosted website displayed the Banner

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.

Document
FREE Webinar

API Security Fundamentals: How to Discover, Scan and Protect APIs

API Attacks Have Increased by 400% – Understand the Fundamentals of Protecting Your APIs with a Positive Security Model – Register Now for a Free Webinar

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.

Keep informed about the latest Cyber Security News by following us on GoogleNews, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook.

Guru baran

Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.

Recent Posts

Hackers Exploiting Docusign With Phishing Attack To Steal Credentials

Hackers prefer phishing as it exploits human vulnerabilities rather than technical flaws which make it a highly effective and low-cost…

11 hours ago

Norway Recommends Replacing SSLVPN/WebVPN to Stop Cyber Attacks

A very important message from the Norwegian National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says that Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS)…

2 days ago

New Linux Backdoor Attacking Linux Users Via Installation Packages

Linux is widely used in numerous servers, cloud infrastructure, and Internet of Things devices, which makes it an attractive target…

2 days ago

ViperSoftX Malware Uses Deep Learning Model To Execute Commands

ViperSoftX malware, known for stealing cryptocurrency information, now leverages Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, to target infected systems, which extracts…

2 days ago

Santander Data Breach: Hackers Accessed Company Database

Santander has confirmed that there was a major data breach that affected its workers and customers in Spain, Uruguay, and…

2 days ago

U.S. Govt Announces Rewards up to $5 Million for North Korean IT Workers

The U.S. government has offered a prize of up to $5 million for information that leads to the arrest and…

2 days ago