Distributed denial of service attacks is quickly becoming a lucrative business. One Israeli online service by the name of vDOS made a whopping US$600,000 in two years. This goes to show there is a significant demand for DDoS services. However, the vDOS service was hacked recently, and information about their paying customers have been leaked.
An Abrupt End To The vDOS Services
It is not the first time an illegal online service is taken offline due to a hack. Hacking Team, a notorious collective of hackers hired by governments and organisations around the world, went through a data breach of their own. Israeli DDoS service provider vDOS was breached as well, and their customer database has been leaked online.
Hardly anyone will be surprised to hear people will gladly pay for DDoS services. Knocking websites offline or disrupting services can be worth the money to some parties when all else fails. vDOS, while once a popular service, seems to be an international crime ring. Its owners are based in Israel, while there is also support from hacker sin the US and other countries.
The group quickly made a name for itself due to their cheap “packages”, which would start at US$19.99 per month. Most of the DDoS attacks executed on the Internet over the past few years are due to this company doing all of the legwork. KrebsOnSecurity has a nice little history of how the company executed their attacks and how powerful they became over the past few months.
Documentation seems to confirm the company made US$618,000 over the course of two years, which is quite a staggering amount. The total number could be much higher, as two years worth of payments was never officially documented. In the early days, the company accepted PayPal payments for its services, although that did not work out in the long run.
PayPal has been a great source for money laundering in recent years. While becoming a very popular service, it’s hard to distinguish legitimate from fraudulent transactions. Once the vDOS PayPal emporium came to an end, the company accepted Bitcoin payments through Coinbase. It is unclear whether or not their Coinbase account has been closed in the meantime, though.
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