The Financial Times reports an angle I hadn't seen before: professional script kiddies extorting money from companies with threats of a denial of service attack. Seems they're currently threatening online gambling houses.
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The Financial Times reports an angle I hadn't seen before: professional script kiddies extorting money from companies with threats of a denial of service attack. Seems they're currently threatening online gambling houses.
That's crazy to think about. I wonder how they are "commandeering" all those comps. I would imagine they wrote a trojan that always looks to a source somewhere online for the next command and hit all sorts of peeps in chat rooms w/ it... and then little 14yo girls are taking down online gambling houses and are involved in coorporate blackmail. LMAO. I could run on forever making up stories on this one. I think I'll write a comic book.
Haven't they been doing that for some time now?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/33954.html
That article I linked to is almost a year old now.
I had thought I heard about them doing this to people who run pr0n sites in exchange for free service. If they didn't give them accounts, then they got DDoS'd...
It isn't too hard to get the computers. The just load a trojan on the "zombie's" computer, then they have a password protected chatroom in mirc with a bunch of bots that they use to call those computers. When they want to attack someone, they go to their irc chat room and issue the attack command with a target address.
But yeah, that is sick. And how do they think they are going to get away with that money? I doubt any skiddie is that knowlegeable in that area.
It's widely rumored that there are connections between Russian/Eastern European crackers and the Russian Mafia. That would explain how they plan to get away with it. That would also explain why they're asking for $40k, instead of $100 worth of porn access.
That disgusts me more than anything else on the internet. The very idea that somebody would essentially hold systems for ransom is awful. It's sad that there are people who are obviously motivated solely by money running around. At least most s kiddies are just doing it to be cool.
Lansing_Banda's right, it has to be a semi-professional, very few script kiddies could get away with something like that. It's not the technical side of it that's difficult, it's the financial side.
But if all I have to do to get free porn is a DDoS...... LOL.
Whatever happened to a big guy named "Fat" Tony going to the local pr0n shop and extorting money for "protection"?...J/k :)
"Professional Script Kiddies" - isn't that an oxymoron? Heh heh..
Yeah, it'd have to be someone else.. due to the financial side. Once a cash transaction is made, a paper trail a mile long is created, and the authorities (depending on the country or treaty we're talking about) can jump. Besides, to really DDoS a location with lots of bandwidth, you'd have to have a pretty big bot network.. that's usually the domain of organized groups, not kids who aren't old enough to drive.
Some speakers I've seen recently from CERT and the FBI on DDoS have been quoting statistics having evidence of bot networks as big as 14,000 computers. No hard evidence, but estimates based on profiles of whats been going around. Myth or truth? Who really knows.
l00p
Quote:
Originally posted here by InfiniteL00p
Some speakers I've seen recently from CERT and the FBI on DDoS have been quoting statistics having evidence of bot networks as big as 14,000 computers. No hard evidence, but estimates based on profiles of whats been going around. Myth or truth? Who really knows.
l00p
I bet Myth. These guys get caught, and its reported as news. Recently, I have not seen any recent mass Dos attacks causing long term damage on high profile sites. If the dos attack lasts long, it gets to be traceable.
Ahem. WorldPay was DDoS'd into the ground for almost a week.
I do contract work for a major ISP and you would be amazed at how many DDoS attacks happen on a regular basis....yes, they are traceable, but it can be very time consuming depending on the level of knowledge that the twit has. Fro the most part, the attacks that I've backtraced have been out of places like Bolivia, Russia, Taiwan and are not really feasable to pursue, so they end up getting away with it. We just take the hit on our routers and they eventually go away.
I see lots of dos attacks, however the big firewalls out today (CP AI and PIX that I work with) can handle them with minor traffic loss. I can trace them in a few minutes and usually kill the BGP route from the offending black hole, or foreign IP.
I have never personally seen a successfull DOS attack unless its a zombie virus. Those situations are usually fixed with reverse poison DNS (takes a few hours). The Zombie Dos attacks I have seen are IP. Even if it was DNS, I could solve that too.
Im the owner of an Hosting Provider in Costa Rica, and for that reason we have quite a few clients in the gambling business, we have been experiencing awful DOS attacks from hundreds of Zombies all over europe and the US, we have invested in serious hardware like the WatchGuard V100 (20+ K) and secondary internet pipes to survive these attacks, they are getting more and more sophisticated, now the totally use spoofed packets on port 80 so its really difficult to solve and track unless the source computer is making > 100 connections per second, we have upgraded pipes into Fiber Optic but reality is ... unless we have a burstable 1GB connection there is no way to kill the attacks ...
Our clients constantly receive ransom notes from Russia asking for 30K to on western union to stop the attacks ... just sucks ...
i been trying to get access to one of these infected computers to infect a computer of mine with this backdoor and see where its reporting to ... im sure it reports to an irc chat room server and im sure i can take it from there however isps do not help ... this is a battle that will spread over and over ... UGLY