Croatian police discovered and arrested the owner of the world's largest illegal service used for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, the Interior Ministry said on Wednesday.

The website Webstresser.org is the largest service on the Internet allowing users to pay for DDoS cyber attacks against websites all over the world. With more than 136,000 registered users and 4 million cyber attacks committed until April 2018, Webstresser.org was one of the greatest threats for essential online services offered by banks, businesses, and state institutions around the world.

The website was managed by a 19-year-old Croatian national who was arrested on April 24 and charged with serious crimes against computer systems, programmes or data, a felony carrying a sentence of up to eight years in prison.

The arrest came as a result of an investigation by the Croatian police’s newly established Cybernetic Security Unit, tasked with combating all kinds of cyberspace threats.

The globe-spanning investigation, codenamed Manufaktura, was supported by Europol, and local police coordinated their efforts with law enforcement agencies from the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, Serbia, Spain, Italy and Hong Kong, which moved to arrest other individuals in their jurisdictions suspected of enabling and using DDoS attacks.

When launching DDoS attacks via Webstresser.org, attackers would remotely control devices connected to the Internet, and redirects a large volume of Internet traffic towards a targeted website, which results in the website or the online service it provides slowing down, or rendering it completely inaccessible to users.

Although DDoS attackers once had to be well versed in Internet technology, with illegal services such as Webstresser.org, this is no longer the case. Their users could pay a fee via online payment platforms or cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and for as little as €15 could use the infrastructure controlled by the website to perform DDoS attacks to any website of their choosing.

In a separate statement released on Wednesday, Serbian police said they arrested two young men aged 19 and 21 in southern Serbia connected to the case, suspected of working as administrators for the website.

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