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.”
This is just more proof that law enforcement doesn’t need age verification or backdoors to fight crime.
I’m telling you, using pigeons is the safest route for criminals. Fuck email.
To those fretting: there is a wide margin between a legit VPN service and these guys. Interpol are not coming for your paid run-of-the-mill VPN provider.
I hadn’t even heard of 1VPN prior to this story, and the reason is that they advertise almost exclusively on cybercrime forums - mentioned multiple times in the article.
The administration/owner of this VPN service explicitly tailored their business to enabling cybercrime. That’s real stupid, because it means you become a legitimate law enforcement target as an accomplice with prior knowledge / facilitator to a crime, and generally explicitly waives your immunity rights as a service provider under legal frameworks like EU DSA.
Dutch police stressed that this particular VPN service “was considered criminal, because it specifically targeted cyber criminals.”
First VPN “mainly advertised on the cyber criminal forums known to the police and thus expressly approached cyber criminals as potential clients,” Dutch police said. “The website of the service also stated that any cooperation with the judiciary would be denied, that the service was not subject to any jurisdiction".
Lol. There is no country on earth that is not subject to any jurisdiction - as the VPN provider and users found out.
Any legit VPN has a thorough ToS/policy to explain acceptable and unacceptable use of their systems (including any illlegal use like crimes/DDOS/etc), and to cover the legal jurisdiction they fall under and what they do when recieving legal court orders.
If anything, be pissed that this intentional cybercrime service tarnished the concept of VPNs a little, not that they were pursued and busted. Your legit provider is safe.
TOR?
tor can also be monitored by controlling enough exit nodes, something that a government, or europol can propably do.
Honestly I’d assume something like this would be a honeypot
You mean 1VPN was made by law enforcement to catch criminals?
If it didn’t start that way, as we see here it did become one.
I don’t know if this one is but that would be my first assumption about any vpn that’s explicitly advertising to criminals to do crime
makes sense. then law enforcement can claim they cracked the criminal VPN, which both casts doubt on VPN security, and makes VPNs look criminal.
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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?
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.
Governments don’t hate privacy intrinsically. They just don’t think it’s important.
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?
I would still say no.
You should have a right to privacy. And there are still ways in which law enforcement could investigate and track perpetrators of crimes and implement “justice,” though as is obvious in America now, justice isn’t ethical either, and what can be labelled as crime, or even terrorism (take a look at NSPM-7.
Even if 100% ethical, I still have my right to privacy. Should I commit a crime, then I would forfeit that right. It would be up to law enforcement to enforce that law. By penalizing a VPN service, which is a leg service, it removes the right of privacy from everyone, not just myself whom they supposedly had evidence of a crime in this hypothetical. Otherwise, they targeted a VPN for their claims alone.
Regardless of that, taking down said VPN will not stop crimes from occurring. Users will simply use other VPN services as more exist.
Given the recent legislation to try an ban VPNs, this could mean that VPNs could be forced to track the traffic of users, which kind of defeats the point of them. Even in this 100% ethical government scenario.
Basically, law enforcement has the tools to individually track perpetrators already, if they were interested. In real life, they’re interested in protecting capital. Individual investigations are expensive. But working with corporations and governments to collect data and track all users? Well then it becomes much cheaper to press a button and arrest someone for whatever “crime” you define.
I think the real questions at hand are:
Is it ethical to remove the right of privacy of everyone in the name of “justice?” (No)
Are the laws by which certain actions are labelled as crime ethical? (Also, no.)
We believe that justice should be ethical. When capital and authiritarians rule, justice has no ethics.
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).
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 guess maybe?
But it’s not worth considering, because they’ll never be 100% ethical nor 100% secure with it.
Like asking, “Would you smoke if you could be 100% sure that you’d never have any negative health effects from it?”
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.
Cloudflare when?
Thanks Europoop, I feel so much safer now /s
That’s a first. Next please.
Thanks for the downvotes, do you realize even if privacy is good, some “privacy providers” are trash ?
