The FBI apprehended a couple of Israeli teenagers for running an online booter service called vDOS.
Majority of the money has been acquired through bitcoin transactions.
According to Brian Krebs, who writes for Krebs on Security, between April and July 2016, 277 million seconds worth of attack time have been incurred.
It has been noted that the pair had clogged the internet superhighway for years. Uncovering the identity of the suspects has turned out to be easy considering that the service prohibited attacks against websites which originated from Israel.
It has been known that their customer service feature will warn the site's administrators directly with a text message. Moreover, the site's email domain has been directly registered to one of the owners.
Owners of the popular online attack-for-hire service have already been identified as Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani. The FBI has questioned and released the 18-year olds on a $10,000 bond each.
Authorities in Israel have seized their passports and placed the two under house arrest for 10 days. The suspects are also forbidden to use the internet or any related telecommunication units for the next 30 days.
The teenagers have been helping customers coordinate a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that is designed to hit websites offline. Because the online booter system got hacked heavily, secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets have been exposed.
The involvement of Krebs on Security has been due to an attack made by the two young men who spiked the company's domain with up to 140 Gbps. For a stretch, the site has been available but protection firm Prolexic/Akamai managed to repel the attacks.
Both Huri and Bidani have been passive about their activities online which means that the teenagers were not careful enough to cover their tracks. In fact, Yarden's hacker name AppleJ4ck can be traced through his Facebook page which is now abandoned.
Itay's phone number on the other hand has been listed on the vDOS customer support system. Meanwhile, the FBI has found incriminating evidence against the Israelis. The teenagers have written a technical paper for an Israeli security magazine identified as Digital Whisper about DDOS attack methods.
