Scams & Phishing News The Fall of LabHost: Law Enforcement Shuts Down Phishing Service Provider

[CyberPanther]

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https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/24/d/labhost-takedown.html

LabHost takedown​

On Thursday, April 18, 2024, the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service, along with fellow UK and international law enforcement, as well as several trusted private industry partners, conducted an operation that succeeded in taking down the Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) provider LabHost. This move was also timed to coincide with a number of key arrests related to this operation. In this entry, we will briefly explain what LabHost was, how it affected its victims, and the impact of this law enforcement operation — including the assistance provided by Trend Micro.

What is LabHost?​

Figure 1. LabHost sign-in page
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In late 2021, LabHost (AKA LabRat) emerged as a new PhaaS platform, growing over time to eventually offer dozens of phishing pages targeting banks, high-profile organizations, and other service providers located around the world, but most notably in Canada, the US, and the UK. The popularity of the platform meant that at the time of the takedown, it boasted more than 2,000 criminal users, who had used it to deploy over 40,000 fraudulent sites leading to hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide.