An international law enforcement operation, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Dutch National Police, has led to the shutdown of a website linked to more than four million cyber attacks across the globe, including attacks targeting some of the UK’s biggest banks.

Authorities in five countries including the Netherlands, Serbia, Croatia and Canada, with support from Police Scotland and Europol, targeted six members of the crime group behind webstresser.org. Dutch police, with assistance from Germany and the United States, then seized servers and took down the website.

Cyber criminals across the world have used webstresser.org, which could be rented for as little as $14.99, to launch in excess of four million so-called distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, in which high volumes of internet traffic are launched at target computers to disable them. Individuals with little or no technical knowledge could rent the webstresser service to launch crippling DDOS attacks across the world.

“Cyber crime, by default, is a threat that crosses borders and our response must be one that utilises the close international law enforcement collaboration that is crucial to tackling this threat,” commented Jo Goodall, Senior Investigating Officer at the NCA. “The arrests made over the past two days show that the internet does not provide bullet-proof anonymity to offenders and we expect to identify further suspects linked to the site in the coming weeks and months as we examine the evidence we have gathered.”

“Cyber offenders can act against UK targets from anywhere in the world and this means UK-based offenders can also attack targets in any country,” she added. “Our success depends on law enforcement, government and industry working together to fight cyber crime.”

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Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.