Croatian Police Arrest Operator Behind Global DDoS Attack Platform Webstresser

DDoS stands for is “Distributed Denial of Service”. DDoS attacks are even as old as the modern internet itself.

Croatian police have confirmed the arrest of a 19-year old individual who is alleged to be operating an illegal internet service for Webstresser.org, an illegal internet service used to launch cyber attacks globally.

Webstresser.org is known to have some 136,000 registered users and initiated four million recorded cyber attacks until April this year. A sizable number of the targets were online services belonging to banks, public institutions and large swathes of the business and enterprise sectors.

The Croatian police cooperated with the forces from Canada, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Great Britain in a sweeping international operation wherein several users of the DDoS service were also arrested.

A police statement said:

“Webstresser.org, which was managed by a 19-old Croatian citizen, is a global internet service where users could hire a so-called DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) possibility to attack owners of web sites globally.”

Every registered user of Webstresser.org had the means to purchase their way into accessing an online DDoS infrastructure for attacking websites for a relatively measly 15 euros.

The DDoS attacks were aimed at blocking online services or slowing down by directing a large mount of traffic toward the targeted website. If the teenager is found guilty of charges of criminal acts against computer systems, he could be jailed up to eight years.

Webstresser has been operating on the darknet since 2015 and was the common go-to service for turn-key DDoS attacks.

Meanwhile, Andrei Barysevich – researcher and dark web expert at security firm Recorded Future cautioned: “I am afraid the problem is not likely to be solved any time soon,” claiming there are more than 50 underground DDoS vendors offering services similar to that of Webstresser.

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