Security News > 2020 > June > Owners of DDoS-for-Hire Service vDOS Get 6 Months Community Service
The co-owners of vDOS, a now-defunct service that for four years helped paying customers launch more than two million distributed denial-of-service attacks that knocked countless Internet users and websites offline, each have been sentenced to six months of community service by an Israeli court.
A judge in Israel handed down the sentences plus fines and probation against Yarden Bidani and Itay Huri, both Israeli citizens arrested in 2016 at age 18 in connection with an FBI investigation into vDOS. Until it was shuttered in 2016, vDOS was by far the most reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire or "Booter" service on the market, allowing even completely unskilled Internet users to launch crippling assaults capable of knocking most websites offline.
Both defendants received the lowest possible sentence - six months of community service under the watch of the Israeli prison service - mainly because the accused were minors during the bulk of their offenses.
Less than two weeks after the 2016 arrest of Bidani and Huri, KrebsOnSecurity.com suffered a three-day outage as a result of a record 620 Gbps attack that was alleged to have been purchased in retribution for my reporting on vDOS. That attack caused stability issues for other companies using the same DDoS protection firm my site enjoyed at the time, so much so that the provider terminated my service with them shortly thereafter.
The two men responsible for creating and unleashing the Mirai botnet each avoided jail time thanks to their considerable cooperation with the FBI. Likewise, Pennsylvania resident David Bukoski recently got five years probation and six months of "Community confinement" after pleading guilty to running the Quantum Stresser booter service.