Armada Collective Back with Ransom Linked DDos Assaults

Armada Collective a group which carried out DDoS extortion attacks is back after a year continuing to threaten people running websites by sending them extortion e-mails.

Scaring one particular website owner by saying he would receive one 10-300 Gbps sized distributed denial-of-service assault, the extortion e-mail said that he should otherwise pay up 1 Bitcoin (USD610) at one given address within 24-hrs. The message further threatened that the amount of fees would increase and become 20 Bitcoin (USD12,150) should the DDoS assault begin while he may desire the attack's stoppage.

The above kinds of extortion assaults were occurring frequently in 2015 when certain hackers' gang calling itself DD4BC began executing them. Nevertheless, Europol arrested it during 2015 winter; however, many others came into the scene following its steps. One of them was Armada Collective that in its most lucrative attack victimized e-mail provider ProtonMail that had to pay up USD6,000 so as for staying safe from a massive DDoS assault.

Following the ProtonMail attack, the kind of extortion assaults appeared as gradually receding just to begin again in 2016 winter the time numerous organizations began reporting about getting threatened.

Clearly the actual ransom e-mails from Armada Collective could not be distinguished from the overwhelmingly imitative ones which set off after the effective ProtonMail assault.

The address specified for paying the ransoms that CloudFlare discovered during April is exactly same in extortion e-mails linked to the gang which impersonated as both Armada Collective and LizardSquad. Virusguides.com posted this, September 13, 2016.

At that time, CloudFlare said that the phony gang wasn't technically knowledgeable for executing a DDoS assault and that it was merely carrying out empty threats. Nevertheless, following an article from Softpedia regarding the phony gang, the latter imposed a risk of DDoS assault spanning 12-hrs.

Eventually, it's strongly recommended that should website owners ever become recipients of such extortion electronic mails they must spend on services to mitigate DDoS situations in the gestation period from the messages' arrival to the DDoS end-time of occurrence. In any case, making ransom payments in response to criminals' threats isn't a good option nor is it intelligent.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/19/2016