Tally of Cyber Extortion Attacks on Tech Companies Grows

And one that resulted in a full shut down: <a href="http://www.codespaces.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codespaces.com&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s amazing to me that people would screw around with this for 2 or 3 hundred dollars.<p>I realize wages are low in many parts of the world and this might represent a significant amount of money, but anyone with access to the resources and possessing the technological know how, to pull this off maybe could make that in a legitimate way.<p>I have no idea, but maybe state actors are involved. Maybe it is a low level warning of what &quot;could&quot; be done. Probably not... but maybe. $300 doesn&#x27;t seem like it would be worth the trouble and risk but maybe it is.

DDoS attacks like this wouldn&#x27;t be so easy if governments actively fixed backdoors in hardware and software instead of creating and stockpiling them. Much harder to build a botnet if there are fewer vulnerable systems to recruit via exploits.

One thing I don&#x27;t quite understand - wouldn&#x27;t it be possible to unravel a botnet? If you acquire one of the infected machines, a bit of reverse engineering (or perhaps just monitoring its network traffic) should presumably be able to reveal where it gets instructions from. It would probably take the cooperation of law enforcement, but assuming that, wouldn&#x27;t it be possible - even practical - to do?

i dont get it...why not just switch your dns to cloudflare or a similiar service and run under their protection?

Anyone want to start a registry of threatening bitcoin addresses, so we can prevent funds from these transactions from being used? (aside from paying other organized criminals)

I posted this because I found it of particular interest that the blackmailers ask for payment in Bitcoin.<p>It makes you think if Bitcoin is turning into a giant example of &quot;be careful what you wish for&quot;.<p>We have exchange after exchange get hacked and legit Bitcoin users losing their money, and now Bitcoin enables extortion schemes that couldn&#x27;t work so effortlessly before.<p>Where is this going?