Webstresser.org, a website initiating DDoS attack was shut down by Europol early this week. According to sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, the website used to offer distributed denial of service attacks for a price sometimes as cheap as $24 a month and has amassed millions by offering attack campaigns on the lease.
At the time of shut down, the webpage was having a user count of 136,000 and is said to have carried out 4 million cyber attacks till April this year.
European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (EUROPOL) added in its press statement that Webstresser.org was operating and serving dark web users since 2015 and was offering various kinds of cyber attacks to anyone willing to pay. Four of the site’s administrators were arrested in UK, Croatia, Canada, and Serbia in the “Operation Power Off” campaign carried out by Europol
Means cybercrooks who have malicious intentions need not be technically sound to launch cyber attacks these days. They could easily take the help of these services and carry out massive cyber attacks on websites.
In the year 2016, hackers launched a cyber attack via Webstresser on Internet service provider DYN which disrupted the services of websites like Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit for almost 36 hours. Furthermore, the website led to the shut down of 7 of the UK’s biggest banks including Santander, Royal Bank of Scotland and Tesco Bank.
Europol claims that Webstresser has so far attacked financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies, government organizations and gaming websites and made millions from those having malevolent intentions.
Note- DDoS attack is nothing but distributed denial of service where overwhelming fake web traffic is targeted towards websites and databases. This puts a lot of stress on the server eventually leading to the disruption on a temporary or a permanent note.
