Law enforcement shuts down VPN service used by two dozen ransomware gangs
Law enforcement agencies have successfully shut down a VPN service known as First VPN, which was widely used by ransomware gangs. The operation resulted in the arrest of the service's administrator and the dismantling of dozens of servers across multiple countries. Investigators identified thousands of users linked to cybercrime through the service's database.
- ▪First VPN was used by at least 25 ransomware gangs to conceal their activities.
- ▪The service operated servers in 27 countries and offered anonymous connections and payments to cybercriminals.
- ▪Law enforcement agencies notified users of the shutdown and identified them through the service's user database.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/21/law-enforcement-shuts-down-vpn-service-used-by-two-dozen-ransomware-gangs/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 2026 19:33:39 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T19:36:35.673Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T19:36:35.673Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xzSOOBqiRKHY |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An international coalition of law enforcement agencies announced Thursday that they took down a popular virtual private network service used by cybercriminals and arrested its administrator. The FBI said in an alert that First VPN was so popular that “at least” 25 ransomware gangs used the service to hide their malicious activity. Cybercriminals also relied on the VPN to scan the internet, run botnets, launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, and for running scams. First VPN operated servers across 27 different countries, according to the bureau. Europol said in an announcement that, apart from offering anonymous connections, First VPN offered cybercriminals anonymous payments, hidden infrastructure, and other services specifically marketed for criminal hackers.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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