Germany announces crackdown on cyberattack platforms

BERLIN: German police said on Wednesday they had taken part in an operation with 15 other countries to disable online platforms which offered to carry out illegal cyberattacks.

The Federal Criminal Police said in a statement that its “Power Off” operation, coordinated by Europol, had taken place this week and targeted so-called “stresser services”.

These enable distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at overwhelming and disrupting a website or server. Police said 27 such “stresser services” had been taken offline, four of which were hosted in Germany. They also said three suspected administrators had been detained in Germany and France and around 300 users of the platforms had been identified.