33 servers seized. 25 ransomware groups exposed. One criminal infrastructure erased in 48 hours. That’s the scale of the takedown against First VPN, a service built not just to anonymize traffic — but to weaponize it. As of May 22, 2026, the platform once promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums like Exploit[.]in and XSS[.]is is offline, dismantled in a synchronized strike led by France and the Netherlands.
Key Takeaways
- First VPN was used by at least 25 ransomware operations, including Avaddon, for network reconnaissance and attacks.
- The service offered protocols like VLess TCP Reality to disguise malicious traffic as HTTPS.
- It accepted payments in Bitcoin, Webmoney, Perfect Money, and other hard-to-trace methods.
- 33 servers were seized across multiple countries, including infrastructure in Ukraine, the U.S. and Germany.
- Despite claiming to prohibit illegal use, the service actively marketed itself to cybercriminals.
First VPN Was Built for Criminals, Not Privacy
You don’t have to look far to see the intent behind First VPN. Its website didn’t just promise anonymity — it boasted about it. “We do not store any logs,” it claimed. “We would not cooperate with any judicial authority.” And yet, it wasn’t some idealistic privacy project hiding from authoritarian regimes. It was a for-profit service selling access to attackers launching ransomware, data theft, and denial-of-service campaigns.
Europol confirmed what many in the infosec community already suspected: this wasn’t a legitimate tool misused by bad actors. It was designed for them. The infrastructure — including onion domains on the Tor network — wasn’t an accident. It was architecture engineered for evasion. The fact that it operated since 2014 and stayed under the radar for over a decade isn’t a failure of law enforcement. It’s a sign of how deeply embedded this kind of criminal-as-a-service has become in the cyber underground.
How First VPN Evaded Detection for Over a Decade
It’s not easy to run a global VPN network catering to ransomware gangs without getting caught. But First VPN did it — for 12 years. The reason? Layered anonymity, jurisdictional ambiguity, and technical sophistication that outpaced most takedowns.
Protocols That Blended In
The service didn’t rely on OpenVPN or IPsec alone. It offered VLess and Reality — protocols specifically designed to bypass deep packet inspection. By disguising encrypted traffic as HTTPS on port 443, it became nearly impossible to distinguish from normal web browsing. That’s not privacy. That’s camouflage.
Operators could blend their command-and-control traffic with legitimate traffic from browsers and APIs. For defenders, this meant detection wasn’t just hard — it was often futile. Firewalls couldn’t block it without breaking business operations. IDS systems saw encrypted noise and moved on.
VLess, part of the V2Ray project ecosystem, strips away unnecessary handshake steps, reducing metadata and making traffic patterns less predictable. Reality takes this further by mimicking real-world TLS handshakes — pulling certificate data from legitimate websites so that even SSL inspection tools see nothing suspicious. To a network sensor, traffic from First VPN looked like someone loading Gmail or a banking portal. That mimicry wasn’t incidental; it was core to the value proposition sold to paying users.
These tools weren’t developed inside First VPN. They’re open-source. But their integration into a criminal platform shows how quickly legitimate advances in privacy tech can be repurposed. The same techniques used to protect journalists in repressive countries were being used to mask ransomware deployment across Europe and North America.
Payments That Left No Paper Trail
Subscriptions started at $2 for a single day, scaling up to $483 for a full year. Payments were accepted via Bitcoin, Perfect Money, Webmoney, EgoPay, and InterKass — all methods chosen for their resistance to financial tracing. No credit cards. No PayPal. No KYC.
- $2/day or $483/year for full access
- 32 exit nodes in 27 countries
- 3 U.S.-based exit nodes: 2.223.66[.]103, 5.181.234[.]59, 92.38.148[.]58
- Support via self-hosted Jabber and Telegram
- Protocols: OpenConnect, WireGuard, Outline, VLess TCP Reality, OpenVPN ECC, L2TP/IPSec, PPtP
The business model was slick: low barrier to entry, high anonymity, and technical support delivered through encrypted channels. You didn’t need to be a network expert to use it. You just needed cryptocurrency and a reason to hide.
Perfect Money and Webmoney, both popular in post-Soviet states, allowed account creation with minimal identification. InterKass, a lesser-known processor, funneled payments through shell merchants. Bitcoin transactions were routed through mixers, obscuring origin points. The payment stack wasn’t just anonymous — it was designed to resist forensic reconstruction.
At its peak, First VPN likely pulled in six figures annually. While not a Fortune 500 operation, the margins were high and the overhead low. Server costs were offset by volume. Support was automated or outsourced. There were no HR departments, no offices, no invoices. Everything ran on code, crypto, and chaos.
The Global Takedown Was Years in the Making
This wasn’t a quick raid. The operation began in December 2021 — over four years of intelligence gathering, server mapping, and cross-border coordination. By May 19, 2026, the net was ready to close.
Between May 19 and May 20, law enforcement agencies across 18 countries — including Germany, Canada, the U.S. Ukraine, and Romania — executed simultaneous actions. They didn’t just take down domains like 1vpns[.]com, 1vpns[.]net, and 1vpns[.]org. They seized physical servers, interviewed the administrator, and dismantled the backend infrastructure that kept the network alive.
“First VPN’s website promoted itself by emphasizing anonymity, promising its users that it would not cooperate with any judicial authority, that it would not store data, and that the service would not be subject to any jurisdiction,” Eurojust said.
That statement — from Eurojust — isn’t just a description. It’s an indictment of the entire criminal infrastructure model. These services aren’t hiding *despite* law enforcement. They’re thriving *because* of jurisdictional gaps and asymmetric capabilities.
The takedown used mutual legal assistance treaties and joint investigative teams under Europol’s coordination. French cyber units led digital forensics, Dutch authorities handled node seizure in Eastern Europe, and U.S. agencies traced Bitcoin flows through blockchain analysis tools. The effort was record in scope — not just in the number of servers taken offline, but in the depth of cooperation.
Investigators didn’t just shut down servers. They preserved logs, cloned hard drives, and identified user accounts tied to known ransomware operators. This data is now being shared with national cyber units to trace downstream attacks. Some of the 25 exposed ransomware groups may face indictments in the next 12 to 18 months.
The Hypocrisy of “No Illegal Use” Clauses
Here’s the absurd part: First VPN had an FAQ that claimed it “strictly prohibited” illegal activity. It even said it would disable servers if complaints were received. But that wasn’t policy. It was theater. The same site advertised on forums where ransomware affiliates trade access and tools. Its entire customer base was criminal.
This isn’t unique. We’ve seen it before with bulletproof hosting providers and malware-as-a-service platforms. They include TOS clauses banning abuse not to comply with the law, but to create plausible deniability. It’s a legal fig leaf that doesn’t fool anyone — except, apparently, some regulators until the evidence becomes undeniable.
The irony is thick: a service that promised “anonymity, stability, security” for cybercriminals was brought down by the one thing it couldn’t encrypt — human coordination.
What Happens Next
First VPN is gone, but its business model isn’t. The demand for anonymous, untraceable infrastructure remains high. Ransomware gangs rotate fast. They’ll migrate to new providers within weeks. Some may already be testing alternatives on dark web forums.
This takedown exposed 25 ransomware operations — but how many more are using similar tools under different names? The technical playbook is replicable. Open-source protocols, decentralized hosting, cryptocurrency payments — all are easily accessible. The next First VPN might run on rented cloud instances, rotated daily, or use peer-to-peer mesh networks to avoid centralized points of failure.
Law enforcement can’t win this through takedowns alone. They need persistent monitoring, deeper integration with hosting providers, and better tools to detect encrypted tunneling at scale. The challenge isn’t just finding bad actors. It’s distinguishing them from legitimate privacy users when everything looks the same.
There’s also a bigger question: should certain protocols be restricted when their primary use shifts toward abuse? That’s a slippery slope. But ignoring the trend is just as dangerous. Open-source projects like V2Ray weren’t built to enable ransomware. Yet their code is now embedded in criminal ecosystems. Maintainers face pressure — not to police use, but to document misuse and warn downstream adopters.
Meanwhile, cyber insurers are watching closely. Breaches tied to anonymized attack paths could lead to higher premiums or exclusions for companies that fail to monitor encrypted traffic. Boards will start asking: “Could our firewall see this?” The answer, too often, is no.
What This Means For You
If you’re building network security tools, this takedown should change how you assess third-party services. Just because a VPN claims no logs doesn’t mean it’s safe — or legal. You need to audit where exit nodes are located, who operates them, and whether they appear in threat intelligence feeds. The same applies if you’re running a SOC: traffic that looks like HTTPS might not be benign. Behavioral analysis and endpoint detection are now non-negotiable.
For developers, the lesson is sharper. Protocols like VLess and Reality were designed with legitimate use cases — but they’re being weaponized. That means open-source maintainers can’t wash their hands of misuse. There’s a responsibility to consider how tools are deployed, not just how they’re coded. Ignoring abuse isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity.
Scenario one: you’re a startup founder using a cheap, anonymous VPN to access test environments. That service might be flagged by your cloud provider. Sudden IP blacklisting could break CI/CD pipelines. Worse, your API keys might be exposed if the exit node is malicious. Use only audited, transparent providers — even for staging.
Scenario two: you’re a SOC analyst. A user downloads a file from what looks like a standard cloud storage domain. The connection uses TLS, so it’s allowed. But the IP behind it is a known First VPN remnant node. Without endpoint telemetry, you miss the payload. Future detections will depend on device behavior, not just network flags.
Scenario three: you’re an open-source maintainer. Your tunneling tool gains traction in privacy circles — then appears in a ransomware IOCs report. Do you ignore it? Remove features? Add warnings? There’s no legal obligation, but reputational risk is real. Some projects now include abuse reporting channels and detectable fingerprints in default configs to help defenders.
How many other “anonymity-first” services are quietly enabling ransomware operations right now?
Sources: The Hacker News, original report
