Fighting Back Against Denial Of Service Extortion Rings
from the tech-to-the-rescue dept
For the past two years, a big trend in online organized crime gangs is an modern update of the old protection racket. Instead of threatening to burn down stores or beat up owners, these online criminals threaten to take a site offline using a zombie-based denial of service attack. For a while they were focused on gambling sites, but have spread a bit further in the past few months. However, it appears that technology may be catching up to them. Victims of such extortion attempts are discovering that some new routers can effectively filter out the attack traffic, and keep a site running perfectly, throughout a DDoS attack. Unfortunately, the technology is still on the expensive side (in fact, in many cases it's more than the e-mobsters want in protection money). However, the technology should only get cheaper and better as time goes on -- so organized e-criminals will have to move on to the next trick in their book of online scams.
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