May 24, 2026 05:44 AM
(This post was last modified: May 24, 2026 05:47 AM by DramaticIllusion.)
Authorities in Europe and North America have announced the dismantling of a criminal virtual private network (VPN) service used by criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks.
Codenamed Operation Saffron, the disruption of First VPN Service was led by France and the Netherlands, with several other nations supporting the investigation since December 2021, including Luxembourg, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada, Germany, the U.S., Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Portugal.
First VPN, per Europol, offered services designed specifically for criminal use, allowing anonymous payments and a hidden infrastructure that enabled paying customers to hide their identities when carrying out ransomware attacks, large-scale fraud, and data theft.
The international operation took place between May 19 and 20, during which authorities took a series of concurrent actions that involved interviewing the service's administrator, conducting a house search in Ukraine, taking down 33 servers, and seizing infrastructure used to support cybercriminal activity globally.
The names of confiscated domains are listed below -
1vpns[.]com
1vpns[.]net
1vpns[.]org
Related onion domains operating on the Tor network
Codenamed Operation Saffron, the disruption of First VPN Service was led by France and the Netherlands, with several other nations supporting the investigation since December 2021, including Luxembourg, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada, Germany, the U.S., Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Portugal.
First VPN, per Europol, offered services designed specifically for criminal use, allowing anonymous payments and a hidden infrastructure that enabled paying customers to hide their identities when carrying out ransomware attacks, large-scale fraud, and data theft.
The international operation took place between May 19 and 20, during which authorities took a series of concurrent actions that involved interviewing the service's administrator, conducting a house search in Ukraine, taking down 33 servers, and seizing infrastructure used to support cybercriminal activity globally.
The names of confiscated domains are listed below -
1vpns[.]com
1vpns[.]net
1vpns[.]org
Related onion domains operating on the Tor network
![[Image: vibesignature.gif]](https://i.ibb.co/8LvxwtYQ/vibesignature.gif)