- Microsoft, Europol and German police dismantle RedVDS cybercrime infrastructure
- RedVDS Enabled Phishing, BEC, and Malware Through Inexpensive, Disposable Windows Cloud Servers
- The platform caused losses of $40 million in 2025; Criminals used AI for phishing and deepfakes.
Microsoft has said it helped disrupt a major cybercriminal platform operating in the US and UK, causing millions of dollars in damage to different companies.
In an announcement, Microsoft said that, together with Europol and German authorities, it had successfully seized the infrastructure used by RedVDS, a cheap platform that facilitated phishing, business email breaches, malware distribution and more.
“For as little as $24 a month, RedVDS provides criminals with access to disposable virtual computers that make fraud cheap, scalable, and difficult to trace,” Microsoft said in its announcement. “Services like these have quietly become a driving force behind the current rise in cybercrime, driving attacks that harm people, businesses and communities around the world.”
Millions in damages
Microsoft explained that RedVDS was selling access to virtual servers in the Windows cloud. All virtual machines came from a single Windows Server 2022 image, leaving a unique fingerprint that researchers could trace.
It rented servers from hosting providers in the United States and Europe, giving cybercriminals the ability to use IP addresses close to their targets and thus evade location-based security filters.
In addition to Microsoft, several private companies have also joined as co-plaintiffs, including H2-Pharma and the Gatehouse Dock Condominium Association. The former claims to have lost $7.3 million in a Business Email Compromise (BEC) attack, while the latter says it lost nearly $500,000 in residential funds.
In 2025 in the United States alone, RedVDS facilitated losses of at least $40 million, Microsoft concluded. In Canada and Australia, more than 9,000 customers were scammed.
Microsoft also discovered that RedVDS customers would use generative AI to create credible phishing emails, as well as other advanced tools for face swapping, video manipulation, and voice cloning.
On average, criminals would send more than one million phishing emails each month to Microsoft customers alone, compromising approximately 200,000 of them in less than half a year.
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