A group of international law enforcement agencies has reached out to over 75,000 suspected cybercriminals who utilized a service to execute cyberattacks that can take websites offline.
On Thursday, Europol announced a coordinated operation targeting several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) for-hire services, enabling criminals to launch cyberattacks without having hacking skills or their own infrastructure.
As part of Operation PowerOFF, Europol sent warning emails and letters to more than 75,000 individuals believed to have used these DDoS-for-hire services.
Europol reported that information about the alleged cybercriminals was gathered by raiding and seizing servers linked to these services, helping police to identify registered users.
The operation also led to four arrests, the removal of 53 domains, and the execution of 24 search warrants by police.
DDoS attacks remain fairly common due to their potential to cause disruption and their ease of execution, partly due to for-hire services. Last year, Cloudflare reported mitigating what it described as the largest DDoS attack at a peak of 29.7 terabits per second. In recent years, the FBI has carried out several operations against DDoS-for-hire services.