Michael Jepson, Head of Penetration Testing at CybaVerse responds to the news the First VPN service, a popular VPN among cybercriminals, has been shut down by French and Dutch authorities with assistance from Europol. The service was used to obscure the traffic of cybercriminals, allowing them to operate privately, obfuscate their infrastructure, and evade personal identification when conducting a broad range of criminal activity. Authorities involved in the operation were able to access a database of the network’s users, potentially allowing them to connect criminal activity to specific users for further investigation and court action.
“Targeting not only individual criminals and groups but also their infrastructure is becoming one of the most vital fronts in the international battle against cybercrime.
Services like First VPN, alongside similar criminal-friendly VPNs and hosting providers, give threat actors the fundamental scaffolding to launch attacks. These services are often difficult to target because they resist legal complaints and court orders, and typically operate from permissive jurisdictions that rarely cooperate with foreign law enforcement.
Pursuing individual criminals and groups becomes far harder when their activity is obfuscated and protected by these services. Shutting down these illicit hosts and VPNs is effective because it disrupts entire networks, and creates a knock-on effect where further criminal groups are disrupted as threat actors have to migrate their operations and reorient in the face of potential exposure.
Moreover, as has happened here, these operations often contain large amounts of data on thousands of criminals and threat actors, which authorities can leverage for further investigation and prosecution. The data gathered from this takedown will fuel follow-on investigations into activity conducted via First VPN and help target further illicit infrastructure.”
Cybercriminal VPN used by ransomware actors dismantled in global crackdown – Europol
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