International investigators have achieved a significant success in the fight against cybercrime. Worldwide, investigators – supported by Europol – acted against IT infrastructures and suspects responsible for so-called DDoS attacks, including attacks on companies.
More than 75,000 criminal users involved in the attacks were warned by email. Four individuals were arrested and 53 domains were shut down.
In DDoS attacks, websites are deliberately overwhelmed with excessive requests in order to overload servers and, in the worst case, cause them to crash. This can lead, particularly for companies, to outages of critical infrastructure and financial damage.
In the Europol-coordinated operation, 25 searches were carried out internationally. The services used to carry out DDoS attacks were neutralised and servers were seized.
In addition, with the support of a total of 21 countries, including Luxembourg, more than 150 measures were taken against IT infrastructure, and several further criminal platforms were shut down.
The motives of cybercriminals behind DDoS attacks include economic sabotage, financial gain, and political or ideological motives.
