Rakar: The Arrest of the Hacker from Zaprešić is a Major Success for the Police, a Victory in the ‘Uphill Battle’

Success. In one word, Marko Rakar, a political consultant and IT expert, would characterize the work of the police involved in the arrest of a nineteen-year-old Croatian, the owner of the world’s largest illegal internet service for cyber attacks, Webstresser.org.

– If it is true that the police have been searching for the perpetrator for three to four years, that is a major success. These are people who hide behind various networks, like in the movies. Finding such a trace is extremely difficult, and often impossible, explains Rakar.

Setting up a network to launch DDoS attacks like the Webstresser service actually costs very little. It mainly involves a software attack in which tens of thousands of computers are infected, which then function as ‘sleepers’ that can be activated at the request of the person managing the software. The hardest part is distributing that software while the DDoS attack is very simple, emphasizes Rakar.

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– The police are faced with a technologically superior opponent. These are highly motivated people, often extremely intelligent, who can spend up to 18 hours a day dealing with this. Training the police is a long process and an uphill battle, actually. Criminals are usually always one step ahead technologically, and the police really deserve praise, stated Rakar.

During the execution of DDoS attacks enabled by Webstresser, the attacker remotely controls connected devices linked to the internet and directs a large amount of internet traffic to a specific website or online platform, resulting in the slowdown of the victim’s website or its complete unavailability, thus users of the internet service are unable to access various online services, such as banks.

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Every user of Webstresser could pay a fee through online payment platforms or in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and for an amount starting from 15 EUR, they were provided with the infrastructure that enables DDoS attacks on websites of their choice. As announced by the police, access to Webstresser is currently disabled.

– One of their biggest problems was certainly money laundering. The infrastructure itself does not cost much; it involves hijacked computers that are easy to manage. Transferring the funds they earned through the service was probably the most expensive part of the operation. Most likely, the perpetrators made some mistake. If they hadn’t, it would have been infinitely difficult to detect them, concluded Rakar.