The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has recently seized 13 domains belonging to DDoS-for-hire platforms as part of an international law enforcement operation called "PowerOFF." These platforms allowed visitors to launch massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against any target in exchange for payment. Surprisingly, ten of the confiscated domains were reincarnations of services that had already been shut down by investigators in December of the previous year. The possibility of their reappearance in the near future cannot be ruled out.

In order to evaluate the DDoS services, FBI agents created accounts on the platforms and subscribed to paid plans. They subsequently launched attacks on computers under their control to assess the services' effectiveness. The FBI observed the impact of these attacks on the "victim" computers, confirming that the booter websites performed as advertised. In some cases, the test attacks were so powerful that they completely disrupted the internet connection, even when the "victim" computer was on a high-capacity network.

Victims targeted by such attacks often incur substantial costs, surpassing the fees typically charged by stresser services. They may need to pay for increased internet bandwidth to mitigate the attacks, subscribe to DDoS protection services, or invest in specialized hardware to mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks.