Web of Crime: Internet Sieges Costs Businesses a Bundle
[This is Part Four in a Five Part series....]
[Click for Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.]
A PCWorld.com article by Robert McMillan, via Yahoo! News, reports that:
When the first extortion e-mail popped into Michael Alculumbre's inbox, he had no idea it was about to cost his business nearly $500,000.
The note arrived in early November of last year, as Alculumbre's London-based transaction processing company, Protx was being hit by a nasty distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Zombie PCs from around the world were flooding Protx.com (the company's Web site) and the transaction processing server that was the commercial heart of the business.
In extortion e-mail's broken English, someone identifying himself as Tony Martino proposed a classic organized-crime protection scheme. "You should pay $10,000," Martino wrote. "When we receive money, we stop attack immediately." The e-mail even promised one year's protection from other attackers for the $10,000 fee.
"Many companies paid us, and use our protection right now," Martino said. "Think about how much money you lose, while your servers are down."
posted by Fergie @ 8/25/2005 06:24:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home