Slashdot Mirror
Gangs Extort Companies With DDoS Attacks
Pcol writes "The Financial Times reports that gangs based in Eastern Europe have been launching attacks on corporate networks costing the companies millions of dollars in lost business and exposing them to blackmail. Sites have been asked to pay up to ensure they are free from Distributed Denial of Service attacks for a year. One detective reported, 'If the demand comes in for $40,000-50,000, compared to the losses they're suffering, there's an attraction for the companies to pay and hope it goes away. But there's nothing to say it will go away.'"
Firstly, I'm suprised it took this long for something like this to happen. Though I suspect it's been happening for a while. Organized crime has always been ready to utilize new technology in the persuit of money / Power.
Secondly, How is this different from some company installing spyware/nagware that's not uninstallable and then sending you email asking you to pay 20 bucks for a utility that'll "remove" their piece of software.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
So how do you protect yourself from a DDOS attack? Are there any closed-source or open-source products that can do it? I've seen "network appliances" that claim to protect you, but I haven't read any reviews.
The primary targets appear to be gambling sites.
Why is it whenever the mob is involved, their first target are gambling sites? Next thing it will be online porn and pharmacudicals.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The issues becomes when it crosses country lines. I recently had trouble with a buisness in Canada, I live in the US. The US police have the police who's jurisdiction the company is in do the investigation. The Canadians have the police who's jurisdiction the victim is in do the investigation. Neither set of authorities would investigate a clearly illegal act. They both refered me to the FBI who said "Unless it's a terrorist act, we will not even start a report".
For the outsourcing some companies have been doing. You let some Ukrainian company design software for integral parts of your organisation's business and later get screwed by some thugs blackmailing you, well, this is one of those cases where maybe you should have paid a little more to hire domestic programmers who come from a less thugocratic society.
Saving a buck has its limits!
...the targets need not be large companies with high-profile Websites. My small (5 person) company is just now recovering from a DDOS attack against the DNS server used by our ISP; as of yesterday evening, they were getting repeated hits from at least 15,000 zombies. Our email and our Website were completely inaccessible for about 24 hours, and many other DNS customers will have suffered similarly. Various changes in server IP address etc. seem to have fixed the problem for now. The advice from the DNS server people is to use at least two independent DNS services in future. It must hurt to have to tell customers, in effect, to do business with your competitors to ensure service.
There's two kinds of protection:
One kind is the low-level "Pay me or I wreck shit". In this model, you don't actually get "protection" from anyone else, just the people you paid don't arbitrarily wreck your stuff. If some third party decides to play rough, the people you're paying protection to generally don't care, unless it threatens their protection money (ie, driving a store owner completely out of business).
The more sophisticated kind of protection generally involves paying someone so that you can operate without interference. Generally this involves handing over a percentage of the operations as a tithe or tribute (and in fact among Italian mafia, it is a historical descendent of the practice of conquered peoples paying tributes to Roman officials). In this case, since the payment is generally dependent on the successful completion of whatever the protected activity is, you'd be more likely to get muscle applied in your favor to keep rivals away. But even then there may be extra money associated with hiring muscle, and often it is an artificial ruse used to obtain larger tributes. (In an episode of the Sopranos, Tony uses a black political agitator to get more tribute out of a construction business that is already paying tribute. He then "breaks up" the black's protest and later splits the take with the black's leaders).