What are IP stressers/booters?

Until its closure in the fall of 2016, vDoS was considered the most reliable and powerful booter service in the cybercrime scene. According to research carried out by investigative journalist and IT security expert Brian Krebs, it was responsible for of more than two million DDoS attacks in total. According to the report, in the four months from April to July 2016 alone, vDoS generated 277 million seconds of DDoS traffic, equivalent to more than eight years overall. The service advertised attacks of up to 50 GBit/s – more than enough to take down websites or infrastructure without dedicated DDoS protection. In return, vDoS charged subscription fees of around $20 to $200 per month, which could be paid in Bitcoin or via PayPal. The two then 18-year-old operators of the illegal stress test provider were arrested in Israel in 2016 on behalf of the FBI. They also allegedly rented out their attack infrastructure to other booter services such as Lizard Stresser and PoodleStresser, earning more than $600,000 over a two-year period. In 2020, an Israeli court sentenced each of the two defendants to a minimum of six months of community service in light of their being minors at the time of the crime.

Webstresser.org was one of the world’s largest and most active DDoS-for-hire services before being taken offline by law enforcement in the internationally coordinated “Power Off” operation at the end of April 2018. For a subscription fee starting at $15 per month, criminals were able to launch multi-gigabit DDoS attacks via the service. According to Europol, shortly before its closure, Webstresser.org had more than 136,000 registered users and by then was responsible for around four million DDoS attacks. According to the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), they included overload attacks on several banks and numerous other financial and government service providers in the Netherlands in 2018, resulting in customers being unable to access their bank accounts for days on end.

In a concerted effort by international law enforcement agencies, Quantum Stresser was shut down along with 14 other booter services in late 2018. According to the FBI, it had been active since 2012, making it one of the longest-running services of its kind. Quantum Stresser had more than 80,000 subscribers and was reportedly used to carry out roughly 50,000 DDoS attacks in 2018 alone. Investigators were able to track down the operator because he used the same email address for ordering home delivery of pizza that he had used to register his criminal attack service. In February 2020, due to his poor health, the then 24-year-old from the U.S. state of Pennsylvania was given a relatively lenient sentence of five years’ probation.