2 Israeli teens arrested for allegedly running the vDoS booter

The Israeli law enforcement arrested two youngsters suspected of operating the infamous vDoS booter.

Israeli authorities have arrested two alleged operators of a DDoS service, named vDOS, as the result of an investigation conducted by the FBI.

The popular security investigator Brian Krebs reported that the duo behind the vDOS booter service had earned more than $600,000 in the past two years. It has been estimated that the service was used to launch 150,000 DDoS attacks, its customers can rent it for a price that ranges between $20 and $200 per month. According to the experts, the vDOS booter has been active around since 2012.

“vDOS — a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets.” wrote Krebs in its analysis.

The security expert investigated the vDOS booter after he obtained its database in July 2016. The database was leaked after the booter service was hacked. Data included in the archive points to two young men in Israel as the masterminds of the service. He discovered that other young hackers, mostly from the US attack service, were involved as support services.

Krebs analyzed configuration files and real IP addresses that suggested the involvement of two Israeli nationals, Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani, who used the aliases P1st and AppleJ4ck. The Krebs’ website was hit by a DDoS attack that peaked at nearly 140 Gbps, just after the popular expert disclosed his findings on the suspects.

While Krebs was disclosing the findings of his analysis, Israeli media reported the arrest of the young men under indication of the FBI.

The Israeli law enforcement arrested the two alleged owners of vDoS and placed them under house arrest for 10 days banning them using the Internet and any telecom equipment for 30 days.

The duo recently published a technical paper on DDoS attacks on the website of Israeli company Digital Whisper, the Twitter account he was using reports vDoS as his personal website.

The vDOS website (vdos-s.com) is now offline.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – vDOS , cybercrime)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.