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A coalition of global law enforcement agencies have sent emails to more than 75,000 alleged cybercriminals who paid for a service to launch cyberattacks that can knock websites offline.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Europol announced the coordinated operation against several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) for-hire services, which allow criminals to launch cyberattacks without needing to have any hacking skills, nor the need to run their own infrastructure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Part of the law enforcement action \u2014 dubbed Operation PowerOFF \u2014 included Europol sending warning emails and letters to more than 75,000 people who are suspected of using these DDoS-for-hire services.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Europol said it obtained information about the alleged cybercriminals by raiding and seizing servers associated with these services, allowing the police to identify their registered users.<\/p>\n
The action also resulted in four arrests, the takedown of 53 domains, and police executing 24 search warrants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
DDoS attacks remain relatively common for their ability to cause disruption while being relatively easy to carry out, thanks in part to for-hire services. Last year, Cloudflare said it mitigated what it called the largest DDoS attack to date, which registered a peak of 29.7 terabits per second. In the last few years, the FBI has conducted several operations against DDoS-for-hire services.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n