Police shut down drug marketplace and DDoS booter
Two men are accused of offering illegal goods and services online. They are said to have operated completely different platforms.
The confiscation banner is all that can still be seen on the closed domains.
(Image: BKA)
Since 2022, international police authorities have been running "Operation Power Off", in which websites with illegal content are shut down. This week saw a new success: two men aged 19 and 28 were arrested in Hesse. They are accused of operating both a drug marketplace called "FlightRCS" on the open internet (Clearweb) and the DDoS platform "Dstat.CC". The latter was allegedly used to offer overload attacks on third-party infrastructure as a "DDoS-as-a-Service". Both domains were confiscated.
According to the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt), the operation was led by the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT), the Public Prosecutor General's Office in Frankfurt am Main and the Hessian State Criminal Police Office. However, international authorities are also involved in Operation Power Off, and the logo of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) can be found on the seizure banner alongside other offices. So far, the BKA has not provided any details about the investigation. However, "extensive evidence is said to have been seized". The two men are also unlikely to have operated the platforms alone.
Drugs for vape pens
However, the Federal Criminal Police Office has provided information on the criminal activities on both platforms. FlighRCS is said to have mainly sold synthetic drugs based on cannabinoids. According to the BKA, these are becoming increasingly popular among young people for consumption via vaporization devices (vape pens). A comparison with the real-life "Shiny Flakes" case in Germany comes to mind.
Videos by heise
What the two accused are alleged to have done with DStat.cc is apparently more complex. The BKA describes the service as a "central scene platform" for DDoS services. The various ways of making other people's servers inaccessible are said to have been listed by the accused as if on a comparison portal. This in turn is reminiscent of a similar case in the context of Operation Power Off from 2022, when the defendants said that they had only offered comparisons of "stresser services", among other things.
DDoS as a service
However, the authorities strongly disagreed: At the time, the service allegedly enabled "any low-skilled person to launch DDoS attacks that could take down entire websites and networks with the click of a mouse", Europol said. In the current case, the BKA says: "The platform made it possible for a wide range of users to carry out their own DDoS attacks, even without in-depth technical skills."
Such offers are also referred to as "DDoS boosters". Only six months ago, another similar case became public in which websites of the Saxon police were allegedly attacked using the tools of a booter in 2023.
(nie)
