"Power Off": BKA takes action against DDoS offerings
The Federal Criminal Police Office and Public Prosecutor General's Office Frankfurt, with international partners, acted against stresser services. Arrests made.
(Image: Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock.com)
The operation called “Power Off” is intended to put pressure on operators of stresser services, with which technically largely clueless users could also book distributed denial-of-service attacks. Such a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) paralyzes services through many simultaneous accesses. In the operation, the Federal Criminal Police Office BKA (Bundeskriminalamt), the Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime, and international partners acted in a coordinated manner to shut down offerings and reach those involved in the offense. The Central Office is part of the Public Prosecutor General's Office in Frankfurt am Main and often takes the lead in such proceedings in Germany.
The “stressors” are booked for a wide variety of reasons. “Hacktivist groups try to put pressure on our society, online gamers promise themselves competitive advantages,” explains Carsten Meywirth, who heads the Cybercrime department at the BKA. Benjamin Krause, head of the ZIT, sees a pattern here: “Especially younger defendants, including in the gaming scene, often use stresser services as a supposedly harmless fun or to gain advantages in games.” However, disrupting third-party systems is not a game, but a criminal offense, the authorities emphasize.
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According to the German authorities, proceedings in this context are directed against a German citizen living abroad who is alleged to have operated two of the largest offerings, “Fluxstress” and “Netdowner.” The German was arrested in Thailand; German prosecutors accuse him of operating a criminal trading platform commercially and as part of a gang. In a total of 150 measures and 16 searches in 21 countries, two alleged administrators and another participant were also arrested in Poland.
Since 2019, law enforcement agencies have been trying to increase the enforcement pressure on such “Crime-as-a-Service” offerings as part of international actions and are also focusing on deterrence: warnings and direct contact with customers of the criminal services are part of the investigators' toolkit. Four arrests and 53 domain takedowns are currently listed on the website of Operation Power Off; the authorities assume that these numbers will continue to rise after today. The project has existed for years and targets various cybercrime services, repeatedly including DDoS providers.
(mma)
