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April 26, 2016 04:00 pm

Businesses Pay $100,000 To DDoS Extortionists Who Never DDoS Anyone

Dan Goodin, reporting for Ars Technica: In less than two months, online businesses have paid more than $100,000 to scammers who set up a fake distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) gang that has yet to launch a single attack. The charlatans sent businesses around the globe extortion e-mails threatening debilitating DDoS attacks unless the recipients paid as much as $23,000 by Bitcoin in protection money, according to a blog post published Monday by CloudFlare, a service that helps protect businesses from such attacks. Stealing the name of an established gang that was well known for waging such extortion rackets, the scammers called themselves the Armada Collective.An excerpt from CloudFlare blog post:Given that the attackers can't tell who has paid the extortion fee and who has not, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that they appear to treat all victims the same: attacking none of them. To date, we've not seen a single attack launched against a threatened organization. This is in spite of nearly all of the threatened organizations we're aware of not paying the extortion fee. We've compared notes with fellow DDoS mitigation vendors and none of them have seen any attacks launched since March against organizations that have received Armada Collective threats.

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