Both the sites noticed a serious DDoS attack carried out against their server infrastructure earlier this morning. The two then received emails from a man named Jon after three hours of the attack, who claimed to own a Botnet that he planned to use for the DDoS attacks. Currently, using only 20% of the botnet’s capabilities against the two sites, Jon asked for a 2 Bitcoin ransom, which if unpaid, would become 3 Bitcoin by tomorrow. However, the two sites instead of getting scared and bogged down by the attacker decided to offer a 5 Bitcoin ransom on the attacker, which is about $1,600 or €1,500 in today’s exchange rate to ramp up their DDoS mitigation. Samburaj Das of CCN and Hacked says “If you can help us identify the extortionists in a way that leads to a successful police report, you will receive five bitcoins, with gratitude”. To allow investigators to track their DDoS campaign, the bloggers are on the lookout for data like real names, addresses, and attacks carried out on other sites, details of which should be sent to [email protected] ProtonMail, a crypto email service had met with a similar fate last month, wherein the site was under a huge DDoS attack that spread to its ISP too. ProtonMail went ahead and paid the ransom due to peer pressure from other affected services. However, the attacks continued with other groups also joining in and targeting their infrastructure. Owners of ProtonMail were criticized by many people for paying the ransom to the attackers, saying it was a not a good idea as it only provided confidence to such kinds of groups to go ahead with their DDoS-for-Bitcoin extortion campaigns. Only time will tell how the countermove of Hacked/CCN’s went through.
