Europol has recently dismantled multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)-for-hire services that were responsible for numerous cyber-attacks worldwide. As part of the operation, Polish authorities apprehended four suspects, while U.S. authorities seized nine relevant domains linked to these services.

These individuals were connected to six specific services that allowed paying clients to overwhelm websites and servers with harmful traffic, effectively taking them offline for as little as €10. The services under scrutiny, including cfxapi, cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown, and zapcut, were reportedly used to target schools, government services, businesses, and gaming platforms from 2022 to 2025.

Europol described these platforms as user-friendly, requiring minimal technical knowledge from users to initiate a DDoS attack by simply entering an IP address, selecting the attack type, and paying a fee. Marketed as stress-testing tools on illicit forums, these "stresser" services aimed to disrupt access to web resources by flooding target sites with artificial traffic that rendered them inaccessible to legitimate users.

Unlike traditional botnets—networks composed of numerous infected devices—stresser or booter services streamline DDoS attacks via centralized infrastructure that can be rented. This operational shift industrializes the process of executing such attacks, making them more accessible to malicious actors.

Evidence from past snapshots available on the Internet Archive indicates that some services, like cfxsecurity, pitched themselves as the top stress testing tool. They offered various subscription plans starting as low as $20 per month. Similarly, QuickDown provided packages ranging from $20 to $379 monthly.

According to a security report by Radware, QuickDown is among a new generation of stresser services that utilizes a combination of botnet capabilities along with dedicated server architecture to enhance their effectiveness.

This recent crackdown is part of an ongoing initiative, dubbed Operation PowerOFF, aimed at dismantling the infrastructure that supports DDoS-for-hire schemes. Prior to this operation, in December 2024, Europol had already shut down 27 similar services and announced indictments against several individuals in the U.S. and the Netherlands.

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