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Armanda Collective Imitators Churned Massive Dollars through Fake DDos Threats


An anonymous cyber-criminal gang has extorted a massive amount of dollars from Cloudflare clients just via a threat that they would be served denial of service assaults. The threat, however, wasn't ever executed.

According to Matthew Prince, chief executive and founder of Cloudflare, over 100 clients of Cloudflare had got electronic mails that the "Armada Collective" supposedly sent insisting they pay 10-50 Bitcoin (A$6,000-A$30,000) as protection fees. The e-mails had been coming during February-March 2016.

It isn't clear whether the individuals creating scare for BlackVPN happen to be the identical gang alternatively are simply copycats. In the case of Anonymous, it is nearly impossible for substantiating if somebody asserts he belongs to the group. Indeed according to a December report, it has been shown what way these hacker collectives frequently get imitated.

BlackVPN stated that a threat for a DDoS onslaught was sent it on 18th April, so it had been getting ready.

The first Armada Collective, in November 2015, executed an enormous DDoS assault on ProtonMail the encrypted e-mail supplier based in Switzerland. The country's governmental CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) earlier cautioned about the attempts to blackmail by the group that frequently were done prior to a demonstrative assault indicating the threat's credibility.

Apparently, it's this standing on which the latest criminals are depending upon for amassing targets. As different from the first DD4BC/Armada Collective, the imitated gang doesn't threat with a demonstrative assault, nevertheless, it has made its firepower size twofold to 1Tbps. Cso.com posted this, April 26, 2016.

According to experts from Cloudflare, they became alert about the activities of the copycats when 100-and-more firms asked Cloudflare what it was doing regarding its DDoS protection facility.

The latest instance about a ransom demand from Armada Collective follows BlackVPN's that got a similar ransom demand previous week. Moreover, the Cloak VPN service too got one likewise, although it didn't hold Armada Collective responsible. Interestingly, the said services encountered periods of DDoS downtimes, as different from Cloudflare's report, thereby making an impression that two-or-more imitating groups are executing the threats. So-called participants from the first DDBC4/Armada Collective got detained in January.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/2/2016

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