Following the Money Hobbled vDOS Attack-for-Hire Service
Summary: Researchers at New York University posed as buyers of nearly two dozen booter services to find the PayPal accounts they used, and PayPal then seized those accounts and balances; vDOS revenue peaked at over $42,000 a month in mid-2015 and fell to just over $20,000 a month after the intervention. The paper reports the payment intervention correlates to a 40 percent decrease in attack volume, about 40,000 fewer attacks and 2 fewer attack years per month, and that vDOS launched 915,000 DDoS attacks over two of its four years in operation.
Why it matters: Cutting off a single payment channel halved vDOS's revenue and removed roughly 40,000 attacks a month, while most customers who lost PayPal simply never came back - the choke point was the money, not the malware.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Cybercrime & Law Enforcement
- Related
- Gootloader Malware Disrupted After Infecting 25,000 Computers Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026354 dark web vendors and buyers arrested in Operation Tor Nado Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026Law Enforcement Disrupts Gootloader, CastleRAT, and StealC Infrastructure Cyber Risks · Nov 13, 2026