A global coalition of law enforcement agencies has emailed more than 75,000 suspected cybercriminals who paid for a service that launched cyberattacks that took websites offline.
On Thursday, Europol announced a coordinated operation against several distributed denial of service (DDoS) rental services that allow criminals to launch cyberattacks without the need for hacking skills or operating their own infrastructure.
As part of a law enforcement operation called Operation Power Off, Europol sent warning emails and letters to more than 75,000 people suspected of using these DDoS rental services.
Europol said it raided and seized servers associated with these services to obtain information about suspected cybercriminals and enable police to identify registered users.
The action resulted in four arrests, 53 domains removed, and police executed 24 search warrants.
While DDoS attacks are relatively easy to perform thanks to rental services, they are still relatively common due to their ability to cause disruption. Last year, Cloudflare announced that it had mitigated what it called the largest DDoS attack ever, which peaked at 29.7 terabits per second. Over the past few years, the FBI has conducted several operations against DDoS rental services.