“This is not a joke,” e-mail threatening massive DDoS says. Except it is. In less than two months, online businesses have paid more than $100,000 to scammers who set up a fake distributed denial-of-service gang that has yet to launch a single attack.
Except that it was. CloudFlare compared notes with other DDoS mitigation services and none of them could find a single instance of the group acting on its threat. CloudFlare also pointed out that the group asked multiple victims to send precisely the same payment amounts to the same Bitcoin addresses, a lapse that would make it impossible to know which recipients paid the blood money and which ones didn’t.
Despite the easily spotted ruse, many businesses appear to have fallen for the scam. According to a security analyst contacted by CloudFlare, Armada Collective Bitcoin addresses have received more than $100,000.
“The extortion emails encourage targeted victims to Google for the Armada Collective,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince wrote. “I’m hopeful this article will start appearing near the top of search results and help organizations act more rationally when they receive such a threat.”
Source:https://arstechnica.com/
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
