A Russian gang believed to be involved in Internet extortion and money laundering has been penetrated by Britain’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which announced July 20 that they arrested three reputed members of the gang in a round of raids against a racket said to be threatening Website crashes unless they were paid off.
Whether this gang has any connection to the recent Scob bug – which traced to Russian servers and targeted major financial institutions’ Websites by making itself get into the computers of Netizens visiting those sites – isn’t yet known. But the gang is believed to have taken a page from the old-fashioned Mafia handbook and targeted gambling operations, hitting a number of online betting companies worldwide, the NHTCU said.
The British unit believes the gang contacted the online betting firms through customer service e-mail addresses, demanding between $18,000-55,000 and warning that failure to pay would mean distributed denial-of-service attacks against the sites during peak traffic periods, according to published reports.
An unidentified British bookie was believed to have told the NHTCU about threats his own operation received, adding that all targeted British online betting companies – including, reportedly, Blue Square and Betfair, the latter suffering a DdoS during the Euro 2004 soccer tournament – refused to pay and worked with NHTCU to fight off any attacks, though the extra measures cost some of the companies as much as $184,000, the reports added.
