Fighting Online Extortion

prostoalex writes "Information Week talks about those mornings, when an owner of an online business receives an e-mail message with his customer accounts and other personal information quoted, and extortionist asking for certain amount of money to be transferred to a foreign bank. Although 70% of the businesses surveyed for the article claim they never had to deal with extortion on the Internet, the article claims those small businesses who think they are not interesting for extortionists, are in for a surprise."

Comments

I worry for my employer

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...

My employer has a large site done in PHP that grew over the years, and is rife with opportunities for SQL injection.

They know what needs to change, and there is a plan to get from here to there over the next year, including a new in-house white-box security testing team. In the mean time, we are standing around with our pants down.

The thing that keeps me awake nights is: What happens if some disgruntled ex-employee (there are two floating around out there) decides to seek vengeance against us by targetting us in an extortion scheme?

So who are the extortionists?

[mindaktiviti]

"WagerWeb was knocked offline for about a day, says Dan Johnson, senior VP and senior oddsmaker at the site. Rather than pay off the attackers, the company called on its technical forces to build a defense and enlisted the help of Internet security-services provider Prolexic Technologies Inc. The vendor's services, at about $100,000 a year, aren't cheap. But, "I'd rather pay the $100,000 than pay the extortionists," Johnson says. The gamble paid off. "As soon as we got the service running, the attack stopped," technology manager Burns says."

THAT is really freaky.

Re:So who are the extortionists?

[lukewarmfusion]

Well, depending on the vendor's services I might call that a pretty unreasonable price. On the other hand, a large company might spend a lot more than that on hardware, software, audits, staff, etc. All to prevent such extortion...

--anecdote time--
If you're a small business, $100,000 might not be feasible. But then again, most small businesses won't need that kind of service. I've seen far too many sites ready to be discovered and attacked. One of my selling methods when I'm talking to a potential client is to visit their existing site and point out security holes. In one instance, I did a real quick SQL injection method to gain access to the "secure client login" area. Right in front of the client, we're staring at their largest client's account details.

"Can you fix it for me?"
--end anecdote--

I generally charge $75/hour; that's 1,333 hours and 20 minutes of work before they'd pay $100k. Even with failover servers, load distributing, etc., getting out of the extortionists' crosshairs doesn't have to be so expensive.

Certainly different from legal forms of extortion

[The I Shing]

A legal extortionist, say, a patent troll or industry trade group, has to consider how much they can actually get out of a victim, since there are legal costs involved in filing the suit in the first place. These organized criminal enterprises, on the other hand, only have to do some hacking, and then fling their crap in every direction to see what sticks. Just as street criminals drive small businesses out of neighborhoods, leaving nothing but blight and boarded-up, rat-infested buildings, these online criminals could drive all the small e-commerce sites off the web and essentially cripple the web as a business method for all but the largest, wealthiest companies. So don't look for the authorities to step up efforts to combat this anytime soon.

Victim does online gambling; shady = vulnerable

[Nova Express]

It seems that just like in the real world, extortionists like to target operations of dubious legality. I suspect the low-hanging fruit for people looking to carry out this kind of spam are businesses in the gray area of legality and respectability (online gambling, porn sites, "Mexican Drug Stores," etc.). Though profitable, these sites might have more to fear with going to the police than paying the extortionist. This is why, here in the real, non-virtual world, criminals often pray on illegal immigrant businesses for "protection" money. I also wonder whether the firms being targeted are also vulnerable because they're too shady to deal with firms like Akamai.

Now if only cyber-extortionists would target well-known spammers...

Re:You are so stupid if you pay!

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Anecdotes in the security community say that what you predict is already happening. A bank will pay an extortionist to keep quiet, congratulate itself on cheaply avoiding a scandal, and then they're marked as a Target Which Pays and more extortion demands come in from other crooks.

Re:Sounds like a business opportunity.

[Zocalo]

Who would a person call if they had some problems like this?

In the US? The FBI I think; it's wire fraud which is a very serious offence and the foreign bank account angle takes it out of the jurisdiction of local/state police. I've been peripherally involved with something like this in the UK where the National High Tech Crime Unit got involved; the important things are not to panic and to contact the authorities immediately so they can do their thing.

In my instance, the NHTCU took care of contacting the banks responsible for the various credit cards and everything, or at least passed the information along to the relevent organisation(s). I gather most of the banks simply issued a new credit card without making a fuss or the customer aware of the real reason for that matter. And yes, the perps got busted - or more accurately got stung due to the combination of information recovered from the compromised box and a few "creative" emails written by the NHTCU.