France and the Netherlands have dismantled a VPN used by cybercriminals to conceal their identities during ransomware attacks and data theft, EU police agency Europol and a French prosecutor said Thursday.
Luxembourg, Switzerland, Romania, Ukraine and Britain helped in the operation on Tuesday and Wednesday to take down 33 servers linked to the criminal service across Europe, they said.
The virtual private network called “First VPN”, which rerouted connections via a third party to avoid identification, was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, Europol said.
It “had become deeply embedded in the cybercrime ecosystem, appearing in almost every major cybercrime investigation supported by Europol in recent years,” the EU agency said.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said teams interrogated the VPN’s main administrator based in Ukraine in the presence of French investigators, after France opened an investigation in 2021 over its users targeting French victims.
Canada, Germany, Romania and the United States supported the investigation, Europol said.
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