"Law Enforcement Take Down Three Bulletproof VPN Providers"

Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have seized this week the web domains and server infrastructure of three VPN services that provided a haven for cybercriminals.  The three services were active at insorg.org, safe-inet.com, and safe-inet.net before the domains were seized and replaced with law enforcement banners.  The services have been active for more than a decade and are believed to be operated by the same individual or group.  The three VPN services were heavily advertised on both Russian and English-speaking underground cybercrime forums.  According to the US Department of Justice and Europol, the three companies' servers were being used to mask the real identities of ransomware gangs, web skimmer (Magecart) groups, online phishers, and hackers involved in account takeovers, allowing them to operate from behind a proxy network up to five layers deep.  Law enforcement described the three VPN services as "bulletproof hosting services," a term typically used to describe web companies that don't take down criminal content, despite repeated requests. 

ZDNet reports: "Law Enforcement Take Down Three Bulletproof VPN Providers"