Apparently, cyberblackmail isn't limited to the adult Internet, which rocked a little bit earlier this year over an obscure message board poster threatening to hack a number of adult Websites. A report from London says crime gangs have been exploiting hacking techniques to threaten companies' abilities to do business in cyberspace.
"Gangs based in Eastern Europe have been found to have been launching waves of attacks on corporate networks, costing the companies millions of dollars in lost business and exposing them to blackmail," said the Financial Times.
The paper said the most recent such cases involved Britain's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit probing how an online betting site was taken down and threatened with further mayhem unless tens of thousands of British pounds were paid. The NHTCU is working with international law enforcement agencies, with the hackmailers believed to be working from Eastern Europe.
"We've dealt with six cases now and it's got to be multiples of that, and not just in the UK," said Equip Technology founder Ian Morris to the Times. "It's obviously a worldwide problem. They seem to be targeting high-volume low-value transactional sites."
The Times said these attacks involve gangs with access to as many as hundreds of computers by way of hacking, using them without their owners' knowledge. They issue commands to each computer at once, making a round of fake requests to the victims' servers, the paper continued, with the weight of traffic stopping the servers and blocking legitimate online business transactions.
"One UK company was reported to be losing ($1.66 million) a day in lost business as its service remained down," the paper said. "More than a dozen offshore gambling sites serving the US market were hit by the so-called distributed denial of dervice attacks and extortion demands in September and the tactic is now spreading. Sites have been asked to pay up to $50,000 to ensure they are free from attacks for a year. Police are urging any victims not to give in to blackmail and report the crime."
NHTCU detective superintendent Mick Deats calls it nothing more than a protection racket. "The message to these companies is 'You pay and we leave you alone'," he told the Times. "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."
