Dutch Police Seized Bulletproof Hosting Used to Control DDoS Botnets

Dutch police have taken down five servers offline that used to control botnet service, all the hardware was seized and actors behind the service were arrested.

National Criminal Investigation tracked down the location of the server and then Dutch police arrived at the hosting company data center in Amsterdam and the servers were taken offline

“A 24-year-old man from Veendam and a 28-year-old man from Middelburg were arrested on Tuesday evening. They are suspected of, among other things, computer breach and the spread of malware,” reads the report.

The Bulletproof hosting service provides services to Cybercriminals for hosting malware, botnets, and other illicit services. In this case, the taken down servers used to control botnets that mainly includes Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.

These bots continuously scan other vulnerable IoT devices, if any vulnerability detected then they deploy malware on the devices to gain control over the devices and they are used to conduct DDoS attacks.

“Bringing these servers offline to the bulletproof hoster is a blow to an infrastructure that carried out attacks worldwide. This makes it impossible to control the existing Mirai botnet and prevent infections of new devices by this botnet.”

According to the Gartner report in 2020 more than 20 billion IoT in use worldwide, it tremendously expands the attack surface for the attackers. Most of these are with factory passwords and lack of general security.

The IoT botnets are a collection of devices such as cameras, routers, DVRs, wearables and other embedded technologies, infected with malware.

Nowadays IoT devices emerge as a prime target for hackers because they are poorly maintained, default passwords, 24/7/365 availability, low-security standards.

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