For years, Big Pipes' detectives have methodically tracked, measured, and ranked the worst cybercriminal “booter” services that plague the internet with disruptive floods of data. 🎨: Cameron Getty/Getty Images
announced the takedown of 13 cyberattack-for-hire services yesterday, it may have seemed like just another day in law enforcement’s cat-and-mouse game with a criminal industry that has long plagued the internet’s infrastructure, bombarding victims with relentless waves of junk internet traffic to knock them offline. In fact, it was the latest win for a discreet group of detectives that has quietly worked behind the scenes for nearly a decade with the goal of ending that plague for good.
Yesterday’s operation was just the most recent of three major cybercriminal takedowns in the past five years that all began inside an informal working group that calls itself Big Pipes.
Big Pipes’ detectives have for years methodically tracked, measured, and ranked the output of “booter” or “stresser” services that sell distributed denial-of-service attacks that allow their customers to barrage enemies’ servers with disruptive floods of data. They’ve hunted the operators of those services, with private-sector members of the group often digging up leads that they hand to the group’s law enforcement agents and prosecutors.
Yesterday’s takedowns, just four months after Operation Power Off, suggest the operations resulting from the group’s work may be accelerating. And Big Pipes is still tracking and hunting the booters that remain online, warns Richard Clayton, who leads a security research team at Cambridge University and has served as one of the group’s longest-running members.
In some cases, attackers would use botnets of thousands of computers infected with malware. In others, they’d use “reflection” or “amplification” attacks, exploiting servers run by legitimate online services that could be tricked into sending large amounts of traffic to an IP address of the hackers’ choosing.
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