Authorities in the UK on Monday announced they disrupted DigitalStress, an illegal service for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Digitalstress.su, the DDoS-for-hire service’s domain, was seized after the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) infiltrated the criminal marketplace and “covertly and overtly accessed communication platforms being used to discuss launching DDoS attacks”.
The disruption was performed in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). One of the site’s suspected administrators was arrested earlier this month.
The NCA placed a splash screen on digitalstress.su, warning visitors that the domain had been seized by law enforcement and that their data had been collected. To acheive that, the agency created a mirror site, and redirected users to it.
“The administrators of DigitalStress chose to place the service under a .su domain. This is an old Soviet Union domain which many criminal services use in the belief that it presents a barrier for law enforcement agencies to carry out effective investigations,” the NCA noted.
The agency, which called DigitalStress the “world’s most prolific DDoS-for-hire service”, also pointed out that the data collected during the operation is now being analyzed to identify users of the cybercrime service.
DigitalStress’ takedown was part of Operation Power Off, an ongoing international law enforcement effort to disrupt DDoS-for-hire services. As part of the operation, authorities shut down tens or such services, in December 2022 and May 2023.
“On 2 July, a joint operation by the NCA, PSNI and FBI led to the arrest of a suspected controller of DigitalStress and we have now taken down www.digitalstress.su. We are watching you. Is it worth it?” the NCA told the service’s customers.
In March 2024, the NCA announced that thousands of individuals accessed fake DDoS-for-hire websites it had set up as part of Operation Power Off. One month later, the German police disrupted the Stresser.tech DDoS attack service.
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