Security News > 2020 > December > Cybercriminals' Favorite Bulletproof VPN Service Shuts Down In Global Action
Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, along with Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, announced today the coordinated takedown of Safe-Inet, a popular virtual private network service that was used to facilitate criminal activity.
The service, which comes with support for Russian and English languages and has been active for over a decade, offered "Bulletproof hosting services" to website visitors, often at a steep price to the criminal underworld.
Bulletproof hosting, also known as abuse-resistant services, is different from regular web hosting in that it allows a content provider more leniency in the kind of data that can be hosted on those servers, thus making it easier to evade law enforcement.
According to an analysis by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro in October, a bulletproof host employs various ways to sustain crimes operating under its wing and can strategically allocate resources globally, keeping in mind the regional legalities and geographical characteristics.
"A bulletproof hoster's activities may include ignoring or fabricating excuses in response to abuse complaints made by their customer's victims; moving their customer accounts and/or data from one IP address, server, or country to another to help them evade detection; and not maintaining logs," the US Department of Justice said in a statement.