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FBI Shuts Down 15 DDoS-For-Hire Sites (techcrunch.com)
The FBI has shut down the domains of 15 high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) websites. "Several seizure warrants granted by a California federal judge went into effect Thursday, removing several of these 'border' or 'stresser' sites off the internet 'as part of coordinated law enforcement action taken against illegal DDoS-for-hire services,'" reports TechCrunch. "The orders were granted under federal seizure laws, and the domains were replaced with a federal notice." From the report: Prosecutors have charged three men, Matthew Gatrel and Juan Martinez in California and David Bukoski in Alaska, with operating the sites, according to affidavits filed in three U.S. federal courts, which were unsealed Thursday. The FBI had assistance from the U.K.'s National Crime Agency and the Dutch national police, and the Justice Department named several companies, including Cloudflare, Flashpoint and Google, for providing authorities with additional assistance. In all, several sites were knocked offline -- including downthem.org, netstress.org, quantumstress.net, vbooter.org and defcon.pro and more -- which allowed would-be attackers to sign up to rent time and servers to launch large-scale bandwidth attacks against systems and servers.
Jesus thank you FBI for giving us ONE FUCKING STORY that didn't bring in some more dipshit partisans.
Now if they could just take down "Lisa from Credit Card Services" the phone scammer that called me on my cellphone just before I got to this.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Luckily slashdotting is a thing of the past with this piddely audience.
High Profile ddos-provider websites are apparently those that exist on the open web and are subject to domain seizure.
So, you know, low-hanging fruit, some of which were pretending to be legitimate stress-testers despite not validating that people were hiring them to 'stress test' their own sites.
It's good they're gone and their owners facing charges, but isn't most of the serious ddos-for-hire going on from the Dark Web?
Maybe we can get through Christmas without some online game going down because something they did offended a 4chan anon.
Maybe?
Domain Seizure means we can still reach the actual site by its translated IP Address, right?
Not that I support their Business Model, just to know how much power the US Guv-a-mint actually does have.
Thanks.
Stress testing servers vs attacking someones servers is a very fine line.
Luckily there is an easy way for that to be avoided:
require a website to host a file on it which the DDoS host checks before it even remotely confirms a DDoS order
require in-person confirmation, identify confirmation or similar hard-to-fake method of proof that person A owns site A.
Easily falsified information shouldn't be used.
In both ways, given these extremely hard to fake methods of proof, it minimizes considerable abuse of potentially useful, simple stress testing of networks. The only reasonable way to break the first method would be to already have access to said website, in which case you could do so much more damage than a DDoS could. (in saying that, it's not like you would be exempt from doing both!)
However, there still comes an even bigger grey area, DDoSing with large bandwidth over public networks.
Where does it go from valid bandwidth use to outright abuse?
Some ISPs considered Youtube abuse of network resources, some still do. Google moved most of the significant Youtube bandwidth off-internet to their own fiber to minimize their bandwidth costs, and even with that they still haven't made money on it yet.
Most consider torrenting abuse and that's only sheer number of active connections rather than bandwidth which is rather trivial compared.
Good work regardless. Even if these were legit services, they would have clearly been abused due to incompetent owners despite this.
It would be akin to nukes-for-hire in terms of damage it causes to networks. It's just much shorter term compared to the 5~ months for "modern, cleaner" nukes to hit safe levels, AKA highly refined nukes to maximize energy release, dirty nukes are considerably easier to make, whodda thunk it?
David Bukoski will now be known as David Bukaki.
I turned in several sites about four years ago and never heard anything back.
Americans are too yellow to take on the chinese.
No one RTFAs these days...
Requiem for the American Dream
If the site has a dedicated web server, then yeah the IP address will work even if the domain name gets taken down and DNS redirected.
But most small websites are hosted on shared servers. Dozens or hundreds of websites are hosted on a single server and all have the same IP address. The site that gets loaded in your browser depends on the domain name you used to get to that IP address.
keep disarming and see how this soy shit goes fools , and when the bs happens dont ask for any help
He's been known to DDoS sites of people he takes a disliking to. He's the reason many people have left Steemit. Not wishing ill on anyone, just justice.