Fergie's Tech Blog

Botnet Cyber-Attack Costs Company 300 Million Yen

Kenichiro Tanaka writes in The Yomiuri Shimbun:

A type of blackmail is increasing in Japan in which a blackmailer bombards companies' Web sites with data sent from tens of thousands of virus-infected personal computers to hamper browsing of their sites.

Attackers demand money in return for stopping their cyber-attacks. A source said one major Tokyo company suffered more than 300 million yen [US$2.84 Million] in damage because access to its site was halted for a week due to the repeated "denial of service" attacks.

On Dec. 27, it became impossible to browse the Tokyo company's site for its normal offerings of travel, bar and restaurant information and the sale of daily commodities. Immediately afterward, a person claiming to be from a Net security company sent a e-mail in Japanese to the site operator.

The mail read: "Is your company's Web site still inaccessible? There is a problem with your site so we're offering to fix it. The repair fee is 480,000 yen. If you don't pay the fee, you may suffer [further] attacks."

The denial-of-service attacks continued for a week as the site operator ignored the perpetrator's demand for money.

A check of communication records found the denial-of-service attack had sent data at a rate of as much as 6 gigabytes a second. This means that tens of thousands of personal computers were accessing the site simultaneously, causing the operator's telecommunication lines to break down.

posted by Fergie @ 6/01/2008 04:44:00 PM