At a glance: The BKA shut down the Kratos phishing platform, which orchestrated approximately 15,000 phishing campaigns monthly.
The German Federal Criminal Police Office has shut down the Kratos phishing platform, which orchestrated approximately 15,000 phishing campaigns monthly. The shutdown followed investigations against the operators of this professional infrastructure.
The Kratos service functioned as central infrastructure for conducting phishing campaigns at scale. Approximately 15,000 phishing emails and associated social engineering attacks were processed via this platform monthly. The scale demonstrates the industrial expansion of phishing operations coordinated through such specialized services.
The BKA shut down the platform following successful investigations, thereby destroying critical infrastructure for phishing campaigns. Such centralized services significantly lower the barrier to entry for attackers, since they do not need to build their own technical infrastructure — they can simply book and execute campaigns via Kratos.
For CISOs, the shutdown represents a temporary reduction in service offerings within the phishing ecosystem. At the same time, the case demonstrates that decentralized attack methods and smaller platforms will fill the gap. Organizations should adjust their awareness programs, email security controls, and detection of credential-harvesting domains accordingly.
Source: www.golem.de · Published July 21, 2026
Lumi AI News — AI-assisted curation in accordance with Art. 50 EU AI Act. Paraphrasing and classification via Lumi News Pipeline v1.7.3.