The FBI announced earlier today that it took action against 15 domains that reportedly helped take down other people’s websites, game servers and other online services through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
This is pretty notable, as the holiday season tends to be plagued by DDoS attacks, at least according to the FBI. Successful DDoS attacks have been known to take down game servers like Blizzard’s Battle.net in the past, so devs should be mindful of that in the future.
As reported by Kotaku, the FBI seized 15 “booter” (websites that allow anybody with Bitcoin or a credit card in exchange for overwhelming a server with requests) domains yesterday including critical-boot.com, ragebooter.com, downthem.org, and quantumstress.net.
Because booters provide less powerful DDoS attacks in exchange for little money, they’ve gone largely unnoticed since they tend to be marketed as “stress-testers” designed to help people test servers’ capacities for withstanding such attacks.
According to the FBI, these services are easy to find and are “a low barrier to entry for users looking to engage in cyber criminal activity.”
“These services offered easy access to attack infrastructure, payment options that included Bitcoin, and were relatively low cost,” reads a press release issued by the FBI.
“Each of the services was tested by the FBI, which verified those DDoS attack services offered through each of the seized websites. While testing the various services, the FBI determined that these types of services can and have caused disruptions of networks at all levels.”