Alleged vDOS Operators Arrested, Charged (largest and most profitable cyber attack-for-hire service)

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Two young Israeli men alleged by this author to have co-founded vDOS — until recently the largest and most profitable cyber attack-for-hire service online — were arrested and formally indicted this week in Israel on conspiracy and hacking charges.

On Sept. 8, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published a story about the hacking of vDOS, a service that attracted tens of thousands of paying customers and facilitated more than two million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the four year period it was in business.

That story named two then 18-year-old Israelis — Yarden “applej4ck” Bidani and Itay “p1st” Huri — as the likely owners and operators of vDOS. Within hours of that story’s publication the two were detained by Israeli police, placed on house arrest for 10 days, and forbidden from using the Internet for a month.

On Tuesday, Israeli prosecutors announced they had formally arrested and charged two 19-year-olds with conspiring to commit a felony, prohibited activities, tampering with or disrupting a computer, and storing or disseminating false information. A statement from a spokesman for the Israeli state attorney’s office said prosecutors couldn’t name the accused because their alleged crimes were committed while they were minors.

But a number of details match perfectly with previous reporting on Bidani and Huri. As noted in the original Sept. 2016 expose’ on vDOS’s alleged founders, Israeli prosecutors say the two men made more than $600,000 in two of the four years the service was in operation. vDOS was shuttered for good not longer after Bidani and Huri’s initial detention in Sept. 2016.

“Subscribers were able to select an ‘attack’ package from the various packages offered, with the packages classified by the duration of each attack in seconds, the number of simultaneous attacks and the magnitude of the attack in Gigabits per second, and their prices ranged from $ 19.99 to $ 499.99,” the allegation continues.

KrebsOnSecurity paid a heavy price for breaking the story on vDOS’s hacking and the subsequent arrest of its alleged proprietors. Less than two weeks after those stories were published in September 2016, this site came under one of the largest DDoS attacks the Internet has ever witnessed.

At the height of vDOS’s profitability in mid-2015, the DDoS-for-hire service was earning its then-17-year-old proprietors more than $42,000 a month in PayPal and Bitcoin payments from thousands of subscribers. That’s according to an analysis of the leaked vDOS database performed by researchers at New York University.