FBI takes down some ‘DDoS for hire’ websites just before Christmas

This Thursday a California federal judge granted warrants to the FBI to take down several websites providing DDoS attack services.

The domains have been seized by the FBI just before Christmas Holidays. This is a season where hackers have done DDoS attacks in the past. The attacks are mainly targeted towards gaming services like PlayStation Network, Xbox, Steam, EA Online, etc.

According to the document, these 15 ‘booter’ websites were taken down:

anonsecurityteam.com

critical-boot.com

defianceprotocol.com

ragebooter.come.

str3ssed.me

bullstresser.net

quantumstress.net

booter.ninja

downthem.org

netstress.org

Torsecurityteam.org

Vbooter.org

defcon.pro

request.rip

layer7-stresser.xyz

According to the filed affidavits, three men were charged, Matthew Gatrel, 30 and Juan Martinez, 25 from California; and David Bukoski, 23 from Alaska, for operating the websites. U.K.’s National Crime Agency, Netherlands Police, and the Department of Justice, USA along with companies like Cloudflare, Flashpoint, and Google have made joint efforts for the takedown. This takedown will most likely soon follow with arrests.

As per the affidavit, some of these sites were capable of attacks exceeding 40 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s), enough to render some websites dead for a long time.

Hackers have stated previously to the Telegraph that the rationale behind attacks on gaming websites on Christmas season is about the holiday spirit. They say that Christmas is not about “children sitting in their rooms and playing games, it is about spending time with their families.”