Report: Two Israeli Teens Arrested For Operating World's Largest DDoS-For-Hire Operation

Two young Israeli men alleged by this author to have co-founded vDOS — until recently the largest and most profitable cyber attack-for-hire service online — were arrested and formally indicted this week in Israel on conspiracy and hacking charges.

On Sept. 8, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published a story about the hacking of vDOS, a service that attracted tens of thousands of paying customers and facilitated more than two million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the four year period it was in business.

That story named two then 18-year-old Israelis -- Yarden "applej4ck" Bidani and Itay "p1st" Huri -- as the likely owners and operators of vDOS. Within hours of that story's publication the two were detained by Israeli police, placed on house arrest for 10 days, and forbidden from using the Internet for a month.

On Tuesday, Israeli prosecutors announced they had formally arrested and charged two 19-year-olds with conspiring to commit a felony, prohibited activities, tampering with or disrupting a computer, and storing or disseminating false information. A statement from a spokesman for the Israeli state attorney's office said prosecutors couldn't name the accused because their alleged crimes were committed while they were minors.

But a number of details match perfectly with previous reporting on Bidani and Huri. As noted in the original Sept. 2016 expose' on vDOS's alleged founders, Israeli prosecutors say the two men made more than $600,000 in two of the four years the service was in operation. vDOS was shuttered for good not longer after Bidani and Huri's initial detention in Sept. 2016.

The American-Israeli teen accused of bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers across the country — and a suspect in the threats that led to two evacuations of the Brighton-based JCC — may have sold his services over the Internet, according to unsealed court papers.

Michael Kadar, who was arrested in Israel in March, may have conducted a service offering threats against schools, school districts, and other facilities, according to an FBI affidavit filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C.

Kadar, 19, is now accused in Israel and the United States of email and telephone threats, many of them directed at Jewish facilities. Kadar, who has dual citizenship in Israel and the U.S., has not been publicly identified as the suspect in the two March threats made to the Louis S. Wolk JCC of Greater Rochester, located in Brighton.

[...]Authorities allege that Kadar offered to sell threats to institutions: A single school could get an emailed bomb threat for $30; a school threat that also tried to frame someone else for the crime would cost $45; and multiple schools or a district could be threatened for $60 (with an increase to $90 if, again, someone else was framed for the online transmission).

The FBI alleges that Kadar was a vendor on AlphaBay, an online darknet marketplace that has since been shut down. There, Kadar sometimes operated under the username Darknet_Legend, the FBI says.

[...]A California individual has been identified as someone who possibly purchased a bomb threat to a high school, the affidavit said. The search warrant papers were unsealed to help California authorities build a criminal case against the individual, who was not identified in the court papers.