UK - Anti-fraud Site Bobbear Infested by DDoS Attack

As per the security reports, a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) attack was launched on the famous anti-fraud site of the UK, Bobbear.co.uk, on November 12, 2008.

Bob Harrison, the victim site's owner, revealed that the site is constantly suffering with 3-4 Millions of attacks per day, which are launched by several thousands of PCs infested by malware. These hosts are predominantly located in Eastern Europe and Asia.

According to security experts, the DDoS attacks, targeting the anti-fraud organizations and the communities fighting against cyber crime, clearly shows that the increasing influence of such organizations have frustrated the scammers. Also, sites like Bobbear have slacked down the revenues of these criminals.

As reported, Bobbear is hosting a database of bogus job ads aimed at employing the fraudsters for money laundering who will get a handsome amount for transferring the defrauded money via their accounts.

In a statement given to Sophos, Bob Harrison stated that his website is in the grip of a massive botnet, encountering more than half a million zombie attacks since midnight to 8 a.m. (GMT) on November 17, 2008, reported cnet news on November 17, 2008.

Harrison was quite confident that this DDoS attack has been launched by the Russian cyber crooks. He added that it is a response from the scammers to his work in revealing the Russian reshipping and money laundering frauds that were prevailing over the Internet and playing havoc for several users.

Harrison stated that the attack has been reported to the computer crime unit of Met and also to the Russian domains related to this attack.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, stated that the incident has emerged as bad news for the entire Internet community, reported cnet news. This incident has adversely affected the circulation of several hundreds of pages, alerting the users about e-mail scams that were archived by Bob Harrison over a long span of time.

However, this was not the first attack on the site. A similar spam drive was launched in October 2007 that intended to disrepute Bobbear by assailing all sorts of fake requests for donation.

Related article: US Passes Baton to Asia in Spam Relay

» SPAMfighter News - 12/2/2008