The FBI seized a site that rented out attacks. Your router may have been doing the work.

If anyone in your house has ever talked about booting someone offline in a game, this one is worth reading to them.

The FBI's Anchorage field office seized nightmare-stresser.com and nightmarestresser.org on Tuesday, working with the US Attorney for the District of Alaska and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. NightmareStresser advertised itself as the number one online IP booter, and according to the seizure affidavit it was used to launch hundreds of thousands of actual or attempted denial-of-service attacks since 2022. A 2023 study by Searchlight Cyber counted more than 566,000 registered accounts and 52 servers capable of throwing 200 Gbps at a target. The Justice Department's list of who ends up on the receiving end runs from schools and government agencies to gaming platforms and, in its words, millions of people. The takedown sits under Operation PowerOFF, which across eight years has produced charges against twelve people running these services and the seizure of over 100 domains.

Now the part that involves your hallway. Booter services do not own the machines that generate the traffic. They rent out other people's: home routers, security cameras, video recorders, anything sitting on the internet with the password it left the factory with. A router conscripted into one of these fleets gives you no symptom beyond a connection that feels slow at odd moments.

Two things keep your kit out of it. Change the router's admin password if it is still the one printed on the sticker, and let it install its firmware updates. It is also worth saying plainly that these sites market themselves as stress testing with a tickbox claiming you own the target, and that has never once worked as a defence in court. Tendvane's network scan lists every device currently sitting on your network, which is usually how people rediscover the camera or smart plug nobody has thought about in three years.