The criminals demanded 10 bitcoins not to attack their victims, but the price of digital currency rose so fast that they had to reduce the amounts of extortion.
There are evil people everywhere and unfortunately the Internet is infested with people looking for the opportunity to apply scams and commit crimes. According to the security company Radware, groups specialized in extortion are sending e-mails with threats of DDoS attacks to companies, the group of criminals asks their victims to send Bitcoin Era so that they do not proceed with the attack.
In a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack which translated means „Denial of Distribution of Service“, criminals overload a server in order to make it inaccessible to any user over the internet. In this case the main target of these criminals are companies and their respective pages.
The intention is to generate an access overload, preventing customers or people from accessing the site.
Radware has published a security alert stating that during the last week of last year and the first week of this year its customers have received several e-mails with extortion threats.
In the e-mails the criminals threaten the victims with DDoS attacks. The companies that have received the threats need to send between 5 and 10 bitcoins to get rid of the attack.
According to the internet security company, the increase in the price of Bitcoin may be one of the factors that are serving as an incentive for these criminal groups to practice these extortion crimes.
„Pay Bitcoin or your website will be taken down“.
A company that depends on a website to make sales can find itself in trouble if it suffers a DDoS attack. With the site offline, no legitimate customer will be able to access the page, and therefore, there will be no sales.
The attacked company loses anyway, since even protecting the site has high costs, as well as mitigating the attack can cost expensive.
Radware explained that Bitcoin’s high took these groups of criminals by surprise. According to the security company, the criminals demanded 10 Bitcoins in order not to attack their victims, but the price of digital currency rose so fast that they had to reduce the amounts of extortion.
The price of Bitcoin has tripled since August 2020.
According to Radware, companies that are threatened and do not pay the amount charged have their websites attacked for about nine hours with a load of 200 Gbps being sent to their servers, which ends up knocking down the websites of companies that are not protected, preventing customers from buying any product.
Radware recommends that companies do not pay any kind of ransom for criminals, this will only make them come back more and more often. In these cases companies are advised to seek services from companies that offer security solutions.