How I stumbled across a fake booter site run by international police, and how they panicked when I started digging
What is Operation PowerOFF?
Before we get into the funny part, you need a quick summary. Operation PowerOFF is a massive international effort to stop DDoS for hire services. While it includes agencies like the FBI, the UK National Crime Agency, and Europol, the whole thing seems to be heavily coordinated by the Dutch Politie.
The Dutch police appear to run the actual infrastructure for these operations. They have been active for quite some time now, and over the years, they have managed to seize a maybe around one hundred domains and make a few arrests here and there.
Digging into "Cyberzap"
I have been looking around Operation PowerOFF for a bit, and whilst digging around, I stumbled across a website called https://cyberzap.fun/ .
It did not look flawlessly professional, but it definitely looked legit enough. It perfectly mirrored the thousands of skidded booter sites floating around the internet. It was not perfect, but there was absolutely a solid effort put into it. They even set up robots.txt files, sitemaps, SEO friendly meta tags, and everything else a real website needs to rank on search engines.
There's more to this image! You can view the whole website by clicking on the image to open it in a new tab
However, there was a massive giveaway if you even slightly started looking. The Dutch police absolutely love using bit.nl as their server host. And when you check the MX DNS records, Cyberzap used bit.nl for their mail servers.
I decided to sign up to see how deep this went. I just wanted to let them know that I'm just researching, and not an active cyberterrorist™. So I registered with the email [email protected] .
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