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Gangs Extort Companies With DDoS Attacks

Posted by timothy on from the crisis-of-the-week dept.

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.'"

1 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. To put this in perspective... by InfraredEyes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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.