The FBI and police from multiple European countries and Canada have taken down 15 computer servers that were used in "major international cyberattacks," law enforcement agencies said this week.
Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, said that after seizing the servers, investigators have identified "more than 100 businesses" that were at risk of being hacked by cybercriminals, including ransomware groups.
The crackdown targeted a popular virtual private networking (VPN) service that police say cybercriminals used to cover their tracks while breaching numerous organizations and trying to extort them.
It's the latest effort by North American and European police to bust ransomware groups that have threatened critical infrastructure on both continents. US and European enforcement agencies in the fall arrested two people in Ukraine who allegedly made multimillion-dollar ransom demands following hacks of European and US organizations.
The 10-country sting announced Tuesday involved police from Germany to the United Kingdom to Ukraine. A note from investigators on Tuesday greeted visitors to the website of VPNLab.net, the targeted VPN service: "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED." The note said that law enforcement would continue combing through the VPN data in an effort to track the hackers.
"The cybercriminals using this VPN were committing attacks globally," Europol spokesperson Claire Georges told CNN in an email.
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