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Israeli Pentagon DDoSers explain their work, get busted by FBI
There's not much more than fine print between stress testing and DDoS-as-a-service
Two Israeli men have been arrested for running a distributed-denial-of service-as-a-service site, after one seemingly claimed to attack the Pentagon.
Itay Huri and Yarden Bidani, released on US$10,000 bonds, were arrested following a tip off from the FBI, local news site TheMarker reports.
A Twitter account using Bidani's name and handle tweeted last year that parts of the Pentagon site were down after a DDoS.
Their slick DDoS site vDos-s.com charged between US$30 and US$200 a month for DDoS attacks sold as legitimate network stress testing.
"We are not just another booter, we guarantee 10-50Gbps of UDP traffic per stress test using our DNS method, our high end dedicated servers can satisfy even the most power hungry customers," the pair wrote on their site.
VDos targeted 150,000 victims according to a stolen database provided to KrebsonSecurity lifted from the site by an anonymous security researcher who exploited a vulnerability.
That database revealed the actors' identities along with details of paying customers.
The lifted document mentions victim sites including the UK's Imperial College Model United Nations club, game site GoodGame.co.uk, and anti-DDoS site Zare.com.
KrebsonSecurity says the booter site made some US$600,000 over the last two years.
The pair seemed to have tried to present the company as a legitimate stress testing service, rather than as guns for hire. Customers using the "legitimate stress testing company" are told they "are prohibited from stressing internet connections and/or servers that [they] do not have ownership of or authorisation to test".
Huri and Bidan even authored a technical paper [PDF] on DDoS last month, signing the document with their real names. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
