Two Israeli teenagers have been apprehended in connection with an FBI investigation into a massive cyberattack service named vDOS, which has been responsible for a large number of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the past few years, Gizmodo reports.
vDOS lets consumers choose from different subscription choices that allowed a customization of how many seconds the attack would run for.
The vDOS site has reportedly earned as much as $618,000, mostly in BitCoin, in its two years of service, according to blogger Brian Krebs. The site, which is currently down, is claimed as a bogus site by one of the service’s victims, BackConnect Security.
The evidence trail leading to the eighteen-year-olds was unsurprisingly careless.
For example, the group refused to target Israeli sites in what they identified as their “home country.” vDOS was hosted on a server traced to Itay Huri, one of the perpetrators. SMS notifications also pointed to Huri and partner Yarden Bidani.
More incriminatingly, Huri and Bedani published a technical paper on DDoS attacks in Digital Whispers, an Israeli security magazine. Huri used his real name in the paper, and Bidani used the same email address as the one for the vDOS admin.
Krebs initially outed Huri and Bidani as the people behind the organization in a report he claimed came from a vDOS database. Krebs says the two helped coordinate over 277 million seconds worth of attacks from April to July 2016 alone. His own site suffered a huge DDoS attack after he published the report.
Israeli news sites have reported that Huri and Bidani have since been arrested and subsequently released on $10,000 bonds, but are under house arrest. The pair is forbidden from accessing the internet, leaving the country or using any telecommunications equipment for the next 30 days.
There are no reports on whether the two will be extradited and charged formally.
