I love seeing another win for law enforcement in the cyber context.

Servers and web domains owned by DoubleVPN, a virtual private network, were seized recently following a collaborative law enforcement effort involving the Dutch National Police, the FBI, Europol, and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency.

DoubleVPN is a security tool that has been used by criminal hackers that allows them to disguise their ransomware attacks and email scams. According to law enforcement, DoubleVPN was based in Russia and marketed its services to assist in the commitment of crimes. The hackers also promised customers that they could use the tool to hide their location and internet traffic from law enforcement.

The seizure of the servers and the information on the servers, including personal information, logs, and statistics that DoubleVPN was storing about their customers (all of whom may have been using DoubleVPN for nefarious purposes) means that the service is no longer able to be bought and used to hide criminal activity, including launching ransomware attacks and phishing schemes. It also means that those criminals who were subscribers of DoubleVPN are now known to law enforcement, so we expect to see additional crackdowns on customers of DoubleVPN. A win-win.