Significant blow to cybercriminal infrastructure, Europol has coordinated an international operation resulting in the arrest of four individuals in Poland who allegedly operated six DDoS-for-hire platforms.
These platforms, which allowed paying customers to launch devastating cyberattacks for as little as €10, were responsible for thousands of attacks against schools, government services, businesses, and gaming platforms between 2022 and 2025.
The operation represents a major disruption to the commercial DDoS marketplace that had industrialized cybercrime for even non-technical users.
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Polish law enforcement’s Central Cybercrime Bureau (Centralne Biuro Zwalczania Cyberprzestępczości) apprehended the four administrators behind a network of DDoS-for-hire services known as Cfxapi, Cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown, and zapcut.
These platforms featured sophisticated yet user-friendly interfaces that automated the complex process of launching distributed denial of service attacks.
Users needed no technical expertise to conduct attacks-they simply selected a target IP address, chose attack parameters including type and duration, and completed payment.
This simplified approach allowed customers to overwhelm even well-defended websites and servers with malicious traffic, causing widespread service disruptions.
The business model was alarmingly accessible, with attack services priced starting at just €10. This low barrier to entry enabled a broad customer base to deploy enterprise-grade attack capabilities typically associated with sophisticated threat actors.
Authorities noted that the platforms maintained a professional appearance while facilitating thousands of illegal attacks against critical infrastructure and services.
International Cooperation Drives Successful Operation
The takedown operation involved coordinated efforts across four countries with Europol providing analytical and operational support throughout the investigation.
Dutch authorities played a key role by deploying countermeasure websites that warned potential customers about the illegality of DDoS services and the possibility of prosecution.
Additionally, Dutch law enforcement seized critical data from booter service infrastructure hosted in Netherlands-based data centers, sharing this intelligence with Polish authorities to support the identification and arrest of the four administrators.
The United States contributed by seizing nine domains associated with the criminal network during a synchronized week of action.
Meanwhile, German authorities, specifically the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) and Prosecutor General’s Office Frankfurt am Main – Cyber Crime Centre, provided essential intelligence that helped identify one of the primary suspects and gather evidence on the others.
This action forms part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an ongoing multinational law enforcement initiative specifically targeting DDoS-for-hire infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions.
Booter Services Weaponize Network Traffic
Stresser and booter services represent an evolution in DDoS attack methodology, distinguishing themselves from traditional botnets that require controlling networks of compromised devices.
Instead, these services leverage centralized, rented infrastructure to generate massive traffic volumes directed at target systems.
The technical architecture of these platforms allows them to amplify attack traffic through techniques such as DNS amplification, NTP reflection, and memcached exploitation-methods that can generate traffic volumes exceeding hundreds of gigabits per second.
While sometimes marketed under the guise of “stress testing” tools for legitimate network resilience testing, these services primarily facilitate malicious disruptions.
The industrialization of DDoS attacks through these platforms has created a cybercrime-as-a-service ecosystem where technical barriers are removed and attack capabilities are commoditized.
Transactions typically occur through cryptocurrency payments, complicating attribution efforts by law enforcement but ultimately not preventing this successful intervention by Europol and its international partners.
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