The US Department of Justice and the FBI announced on Tuesday that they have seized domains related to the online sale of stolen personal information and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can disrupt access to websites.
The specific domains seized were weleakinfo.to, ipstress.in and ovh-booter.com – the latter two sites offering DDoS attack services and the former selling access to data breach information. The seizures illustrate the molestation game that often ensues when law enforcement targets illicit online services.
“Today, the FBI and the Department put an end to two common and distressing threats: websites that traffic in stolen personal information and sites that attack and disrupt legitimate Internet businesses,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said in a statement. A press release.
In fact, the services are so common that the US government seized the nearly identical name of weleakinfo.com in 2020. Weleakinfo.to and weleakinfo.com claimed to offer users who subscribed to their services the ability to “review and to obtain personal data”. illegally obtained information in over 10,000 data breaches,” according to the language used in the press releases for the two seizures.
The seizures announced on Wednesday were part of a coordinated action with law enforcement in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Last year, one of the operators of weleakinfo.com was sentenced to two years in prison in the Netherlands, The Record reported.