About 2 years ago, anti-virus and security company Sophos published a report that an online Russian blackmail gang was jailed for extorting $4 million from gambling websites. I thought this was old news until someone told me they’ve been a target of a DDOS attack only recently.
The new Philippine-based company was running an online gambling site when a Russian hacker contacted them and told them to pay him $1,000 per day as protection money. In return, their website will not be attacked and shut down. The owners rejected the “protection offer“.
Within a week of that initial contact, the website was hammered with a DDOS attack. The engineers at the Makati Data Center hosting the site were quick to deploy preventive measures to block the DDOS which lasted for days in intervals or 15 to 20 minutes between attacks.
The attackers gave up after a week.
I think this is not the first or only incident that happened locally. The problem is that the attacks are coming outside of the Philippines.
On the other hand, Ivan Maksakov, Alexander Petrov, and Denis Stepanov were each sentenced to 8 years in prison and a $3,700 fine {source}. It looks like some of their team-mates are still out there.
Hi yuga, I am really confused with all these things. apparently, I am still unable to access Facebook, Yahoo, Google Blogger, and Friendster. Does this mean that my computer was ruined by the DOS attack that has been happening? and would I ever still access those sites? I really cannot understand these DOS thing and how it can impact on the computer of users like me. How can I resolve this issue? I would really appreciate if you guys can help me clarify this things and figure out what to do with my computer. I can’t do anything now because I cannot access almost every social networking site. Please please help me. thank you so much and all the best!