Operation PowerOFF - 75K Users of DDoS-for-Hire Services Identified and Warned

Operation PowerOFF: A Major Crackdown on DDoS-for-Hire Services 🚨

Law enforcement teams have completed an intense week of action against illegal DDoS-for-hire services as part of the long-running Operation PowerOFF. This joint operation comprises teams from 21 countries and targets services that facilitate Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. According to Europol, the latest crackdown happened on April 13, 2026, resulting in four arrests and the seizure of 53 web domains used by hackers.

The sites offering DDoS-for-hire services are also called “booters” or “stressers” because they allow anyone, even those with minimal technical knowledge, to launch a DDoS attack for a small fee. DDoS-for-hire is one of the most prolific and easily accessible trends in cybercrime, enabling individuals to execute criminal attacks with step-by-step tutorials. These attacks inflict significant harm on businesses and individuals globally by targeting servers, websites, or online services, making them inaccessible to legitimate users.

This effort relied heavily on Europol, which helped sift through mountains of seized data. The investigation revealed details on over 3 million criminal user accounts. In addition to making arrests, the police are proactively trying to prevent future crimes by sending out over 75,000 warning letters and emails to individuals caught using these services. The aim is to educate young people and hobbyists that their actions constitute serious crimes. Authorities are even tracking payments through the blockchain to warn those attempting to pay with cryptocurrency.

Operation PowerOFF isn’t new; it has been hunting for these groups for years. In 2018, authorities successfully shut down Webstresser.org, a site with 136,000 users that had launched 4 million attacks. This was followed by the seizure of sites like IPStresser.com in 2022 and over a dozen domains hosting DDoS-for-hire services in 2023 by the US Department of Justice (DoJ). The pressure continued in 2024, leading to law enforcement from 15 countries shutting down 27 more websites, including zdstresser.net and orbitalstress.net. Then, in May 2025, Polish police joined the operation and arrested four individuals for running platforms like Cfxapi, where an attack cost as little as €10. More recently, in March 2026, agencies stopped four major botnet networks, including Aisuru, KimWolf, JackSkid, and Mossad, that hackers used to flood websites with traffic.

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