back to article Cyber-miscreants use Brit e-tailers as personal cash machines

British e-tailers are trying to manage website disruption after they were systematically targeted this week by DDoS extortionists. Bolton-based online reseller Scan International confirmed it first noted “unusual” amounts of traffic visiting its home page on Sunday, which continued until today, peaking at lunchtime. MD Elan …

  1. astrax

    Clueless and pointless

    Some of these attackers are just complete idiots. Risking your liberty for $4000 (or, come to think of it, any monetary value that can be written down quickly in words) is plain stupid. It does clarify just how simple it is to rent botnets these days though, considering I would hesitate giving these types of attacker a spoon in case it got lodged in their nose. Though that may be a good thing.

    1. lurker

      Re: Clueless and pointless

      I work at one of the retailers concerned (and was very directly affected by these attacks).

      Judging by the language in the email my guess would be that the attacker is almost certainly not from the UK, quite likely eastern Europe somewhere - so $4000 dollars might go a bit further. Unfortunately it would be very difficult to track them down, email communications were through an email anonymising service in Switzerland, the bitcoin wallet address we received has zero transaction history and was likely created for the purpose.

      Naturally we didn't and won't ever pay up for something like this. Apart from anything else, although the attacker promised that when paid they would 'never come back', we have no reason to believe them, and you have to suspect that if you coughed up once your name would be passed around as a target which 'might pay up' in future threats. Plus, damn the little greedy script kiddies, not giving them any satisfaction.

      The attacks on us at least were quite significant and caused some major headaches not just for us but for upstream providers, and likely had knock-on effects on others connected to the same infrastructure. The disturbing thing really is how easy this kind of thing is for someone with relatively little technical ability to instigate, relative to how much work is involved in defending yourself from it.

  2. Pen-y-gors

    Plods?

    "Aria reported the attack on its systems to Greater Manchester Police"

    Who have done precisely what about it?

    1. Rich 11

      Re: Plods?

      That could depend on whether they live in an even-numbered house or not.

    2. lurker

      Re: Plods?

      To be fair, there is very little they actually can do about it. But it's a relatively serious crime and still needs to be reported and recorded for the purposes of tracking such events and identifying trends, if nothing else.

    3. g e

      Re: Plods?

      Probably so there's a case number for any insurance claim, nothing more.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    An intereting article spoiled by poor Grammar meaning the message is lost

    Raja said it has let the appropriate authorities deal (deal what, cards? "deal with the incident" would have been more appropriate) and bolstered its defences,

    Aria Taheri, Aria's managing director, said his firm’s website was knocked out on Tuesday afternoon for around two hours, one day after his firm received an blackmail (a blackmail demand not an blackmail demand!!) demand via email

    The blackmailers threatened to make the site unavailable for the whole of Wednesday unless payment was met (payment was met with what a bunch of flowers; try payment was made),

    The evidence is circumstantial at best. DD4BC started off by attack (perhaps consider attacking Bitcoin firms) Bitcoin firms,

    My teenage daughter could have written a more coherent and grammatically correct article; but she could not be bothered.........

    1. g e

      Re: An intereting article spoiled by poor Grammar meaning the message is lost

      Intereting (sic) capitalisation of 'grammar'

    2. astrax

      Re: An intereting article spoiled by poor Grammar meaning the message is lost

      To be fair...despite the errata (both yours and the authors'), the article was well worth the admission price.

    3. Rebelyell

      Re: An intereting article spoiled by poor Grammar meaning the message is lost

      You must be a nightmare dad!

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