In this brave new electronic world, a new form of extortion has evolved: pay up or we’ll crash your site.
May 24, 2005

Denial of Service!

Let’s say you are running a lucrative web site, popping along raking in the dough when you get an email message. Either you pay $40,000 or we’ll block traffic to your site, the message says. What do you do? In most cases, the answer to this new kind of extortion is to pay the money and move on. This, of course, means that the extortionists will go on to someone else and do the same thing, or they’ll come back to get you again.

A man named Mickey Richardson, who runs one of the off-shore gaming sites, BetCris.com, that operate out of Costa Rica to avoid U.S. gambling laws, got such a message at the end of 2003. “Your site is under attack…. You can send us $40k, by Western Union and your site will be protected not just this weekend but for the next 12 months. If you chose not to pay…you will be under attack each weekend for the next 20 weeks, or until you close your doors.”

And sure enough, his site immediately crashed.

In a chilling story worthy of a novel, a website called CSOonline, which caters to computer network security people, reports what happened next.Click on the headline to read it.
",0] ); D(["ce"]); D(["ms","436f"] ); //--> Click on the headline to read it.