Operation PowerOFF, a joint effort led by Dutch Politie with the FBI, UK National Crime Agency and Europol, targets DDoS‑for‑hire services. In a recent sting, investigators set up a faux booter site, cyberzap.fun, complete with SEO tricks and a functional dashboard. When a curious tester registered, the site triggered a rapid shutdown, leaving the domain locked behind a 401 prompt.

cyberzap.fun’s design mimicked legitimate booters: it hosted on bit.nl, included robots.txt, sitemaps, and even sent an activation e‑mail. The dashboard displayed fabricated network graphs and a bot counter, while payment attempts failed with a generic error. The platform’s sole purpose was to capture IPs, emails, and behavioral data for evidence and to sow distrust among would‑be users and deter future attacks by exposing the scheme.

The rapid shutdown revealed the Dutch Politie’s readiness to act on live probes. By exposing a honeypot, they forced a non‑criminal tester to trigger a lockout, demonstrating that even well‑crafted fake services can be detected with subtle DNS clues. The episode underscores that law‑enforcement teams now deploy sophisticated, cost‑effective traps to disrupt the DDoS‑for‑hire market without overt raids and reduce the risk for ordinary users.