An international business of law enforcement shut down the servers of VPNLab.net, a company that advertised its services on underground forums and served various ransomware and malware gangs.
Europol said it had seized 15 VPNLab servers operating in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom.
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 technology openvpn, used 2048-bit encryption 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 to legal requests from the authorities they are not bulletproof," said Volker Kluwe, Chief of the Hanover Police Department, who spearheaded in research.
Europol said that with the data found on the servers, they were able to alert more than 100 businesses of impending cyber attacks.attacks.
