An international law enforcement operation shut down the servers of VPNLab.net, a company that advertised services of underground forums and served various ransomware and malware gangs.
Europol announced that it had seized 15 servers operated by team VPNLab in Germany, Netherlands, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine, USA and UK.
No arrests were reported, but the company's services were shut down while its main website displayed a seizure banner.
VPNLab has been around since 2008. The service was built with OpenVPN technology, it used encryption 2048-bit and a network of services to encrypt and anonymize connections for its customers, for $60 a year.
Europol said the service was being advertised mainly in underground forums as a way of hiding cybercrime.
The closure of VPNLab marks the second intervention of the authorities in a VPN provider that aimed to serve criminal groups after its abolition Double VPN by Europol and the Dutch police last June.
"An important aspect of this action is to also show that even if service providers who support illegal actions do not provide any information in legal requests authorities are not bulletproof," said Volker Kluwe, Chief of the Hanover Police Department, who spearheaded the investigation.
Europol said that with the data found on the servers, they were able to alert more than 100 companies to impending cyber attacks.
