OPERATION SAFFRON — Europol & Eurojust Dismantle First VPN

Law enforcement just delivered a direct message to every cybercriminal relying on bulletproof infrastructure.

In a coordinated action, Europol and Eurojust dismantled First VPN — active since 2014. Result: 33 servers seized across 27 countries, one Ukrainian national arrested as primary administrator.

WHAT WAS FIRST VPN?

First VPN was not a consumer privacy tool. It operated as a bulletproof VPN — purpose-built to shield cybercriminals from law enforcement attribution.

Bulletproof services actively market their refusal to cooperate with authorities as a core feature. Clients allegedly used First VPN to:

Deploy ransomware against critical infrastructure Conduct phishing campaigns on financial institutions Distribute malware and remote access trojans Access underground criminal forums anonymously Exfiltrate data from corporate and government networks

Active for over a decade, the service built a substantial criminal clientele across multiple continents.

THE TECHNICAL SCOPE

33 servers. 27 countries. One coordinated sweep.

Bulletproof operators spread infrastructure across jurisdictions to create legal friction — each country requires a separate court order and timeline. A single coordination failure gives admins time to destroy evidence.

Operation Saffron overcame all of it — months of intelligence work, multilateral legal coordination, and precisely timed execution.

WHAT DEFENDERS SHOULD NOTE

For CISOs and security teams, three signals

1. Bulletproof ≠ untouchable — attribution across distributed, layered infrastructure is increasingly achievable 2. TTPs will shift — expect infrastructure migration as criminal operators rebuild anonymization capacity 3. Update detection models — VPN-masked traffic tied to known criminal infrastructure warrants elevated risk scoring

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Operation Saffron is part of a sustained European campaign targeting the technical scaffolding of the cybercrime economy — bulletproof hosters, criminal forums, anonymization networks.

Each takedown degrades the capacity of multiple independent threat actors simultaneously. That multiplier effect is precisely why infrastructure-level enforcement matters.

Anonymity through criminal infrastructure is a shrinking commodity.

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