If previously distribut denial of service attacks were design only as a form of digital activism, today they have become a powerful weapon us by criminals to extort companies with critical operations.
Have you heard of DDoS Extortion, the new trendy cyber attack?
If you’re a cybersecurity enthusiast, you’ve probably heard of denial of service (DoS) attacks. This is an old maneuver that relies on the fact that every server, no matter how big or powerful it is, has a limit on the amount of web traffic it can handle before it goes offline.
A DoS is nothing more than a “bombardment”
of traffic direct at the target server, making millions or even trillions of requests in a short period of time, with the aim of taking it offline.
When the attack uses several different traffic sources, we call it a Distribut Denial of Service (DDoS). To draw a parallel, it is as if you hir a battalion color correction of people to enter a store at once, but no one will even buy anything — the store will not have enough space to accommodate everyone and the sales staff will not be able to serve everyone, causing the business environment to collapse. Do you get the concept?
In the early days of the web, DoS and DDoS attacks were mostly consider harmless. They were a technique us mainly by hacktivists, who would take down newspapers and political party websites as a form of digital protest. There was even a small open-source program easily found on the web that allow anyone to perform a DoS with relative ease… Of course, you would only be successful if your connection was powerful enough.
Give me money or I’ll shoot! Now, the scenario
has chang. Over the past few years, DDoS attacks have become increasingly effective and deadly, thanks to the use of new techniques that increase the amount of traffic sent to overload a server. The main one is the use of botnets — criminals infect computers, cell പുരാതന ഡിഎൻഎ ലോകത്തിലെ ഏറ്റവും phones and IoT devices without their owner knowing and use the connections of these devices to increase their “firepower”, directing traffic from thousands of gadgets around the world to a single target at once.
It didn’t take long for cybercrime to see an opportunity in this and create the practice we call DDoS Extortion. As the name suggests, in this type of attack, the malicious actor threatens to perform a distribut denial of service against a company’s servers and take alb directory its website and/or applications offline. If the manager wants to keep his assets online, he nes to pay a certain amount as a “ransom” to the criminal, who will leave him alone and go after a new victim.