Owners of DDoS-for-Hire Service vDOS Get 6 Months Community Service
"exec" writes:
The co-owners of vDOS, a now-defunct service that for four years helped paying customers launch more than two million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that knocked countless Internet users and websites offline, each have been sentenced to six months of community service by an Israeli court.
A judge in Israel handed down the sentences plus fines and probation against Yarden Bidani and Itay Huri, both Israeli citizens arrested in 2016 at age 18 in connection with an FBI investigation into vDOS.
Until it was shuttered in 2016, vDOS was by far the most reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire or booter" service on the market, allowing even completely unskilled Internet users to launch crippling assaults capable of knocking most websites offline.
vDOS advertised the ability to launch attacks at up to 50 gigabits of data per second (Gbps) - well more than enough to take out any site that isn't fortified with expensive anti-DDoS protection services.
The Hebrew-language sentencing memorandum (PDF 379 KB) has redacted the names of the defendants, but there are more than enough clues in the document to ascertain the identities of the accused. For example, it says the two men earned a little more than $600,000 running vDOS, a fact first reported by this site in September 2016 just prior to their arrest, when vDOS was hacked and KrebsOnSecurity obtained a copy of its user database.
In addition, the document says the defendants were initially apprehended on September 8, 2016, arrests which were documented here two days later.
Also, the sentencing mentions the supporting role of a U.S. resident named only as Jesse." This likely refers to 23-year-old Jesse Wu, who KrebsOnSecurity noted in October 2016 pseudonymously registered the U.K. shell company used by vDOS, and ran a tiny domain name registrar called NameCentral that vDOS and many other booter services employed.
-- submitted from IRC
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