Law enforcement intercepted VPN traffic, seized domains, and arrested its operator.
Europol announced yesterday the results of the operation against the service, First VPN. The First VPN website now displays a message saying the domain was seized by a joint international law enforcement action.
“A VPN service used by cybercriminals to conceal ransomware attacks, data theft, and other serious offenses has been dismantled in an international operation led by France and the Netherlands, with support from Europol and Eurojust,” the agency said. “For years, the service, known as ‘First VPN,’ was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums as a trusted tool for remaining beyond the reach of law enforcement. It offered users anonymous payments, hidden infrastructure, and services designed specifically for criminal use.”
Great… So now if any criminals use your VPN, you can lose your VPN for good. I’m betting there will be no refunds, either.
Read the article first. They exclusively tailored to criminals on cybercrime forums. If they were shutting down all VPNs which were used by criminals then they would have gone after all.
While performing incident response engagements I’ve seen a lot of criminals using Proton and others, due to them not being purposely designed for criminals they get away with it.
It’s just like when they shut down RedVDS in January.
What’s the difference between a VPN that ensures privacy and a VPN “tailored to criminals”?
Running ads on cybercrime forums and having your marketing language say that you won’t comply with the judiciary.
Are either of those things illegal?
Yes.
How long until they target Proton or Mullvad…
And it’s a backdoor way into forcing all VPN providers to police their own traffic and spy on users on behalf of law enforcement. Because any VPN that doesn’t can get shut down for any criminal activity. Probably ties into all the ‘age verification’ bullshit as well. Governments HATE online anonymity in any form.
It really does look like a multifaceted attack on privacy. Age verification. A VPN shuts down due to police. Increased bad code and hacks on open source.
And I suspect if you trace all these things back, you’ll find Palantir’s nasty little fingers all over them…
Governments don’t hate privacy intrinsically. They just don’t think it’s important. Violating privacy using mass surveillance has no visible downside to the uninformed public. Policy makers just notice that destroying privacy makes it easier to catch cybercriminals and decide it’s a worthwhile trade off. You probably disagree with that. But there are far too many people who just go along with it.
Nah, I gotta disagree.
Governments always want more power. Knowledge is power. So they always want to know what you’re doing all the time. Any sort of privacy gets in the way of that, so they hate privacy.
Hypothetical situation: if the government were just theoretically 100% ethical and secure with the data they gathered, would be that make it OK? Just for the sake of public safety?
I’m hesitant to say yes, but im not sure if that’s because I just want to watch free online episodes on sketchy semilegal sites or because I just don’t want them to know stuff about my personal life?
If they were 100% ethical and secure with the data, one could truly say “Nothing to hide nothing to fear”.
But because we live in a world where they aren’t 100% ethical and secure with the data, we just can’t let ourselves have that mindset (not even in the hypothetical that they are 100% ethical and secure with the data).
Hate is maybe the wrong word, but they’re certainly naturally opposed to it. Like a fish is naturally opposed to living on land. It doesn’t hate the land, but if it gets to decide you don’t get any.