* * * * *
Wake up! Time for DDoS
> From: "MrSmith" <
[email protected]>
> To: <
[email protected]>
> Subject: DDoS Warning
> Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 22:08:05 +0400
>
> Hello,
[email protected]
>
> FORWARD THIS MAIL TO WHOEVER IS IMPORTANT IN YOUR COMPANY AND CAN MAKE
> DECISION!
>
> We are Phantom Squad
>
> Your network will be DDoS-ed starting Sept 30st 2017 if you don’t pay
> protection fee - 0.2 Bitcoin @ 1W5FWQjvHGMkaPeuR4SvRNojsv64WgJNt.
>
> If you don’t pay by Sept 30st 2017, attack will start, yours service going
> down permanently price to stop will increase to 20 BTC (Bitcoin) and will
> go up 10 BTC for every day of attack.
>
> This is not a joke.
>
Not quite as dramatic as the last email I received from a black-hat cracker
[1] but I do have to wonder—why me?
I'm not a company. I don't make money from this blog. Heck, I don't make any
money from my website [2] at all. So why target me? It doesn't make sense—I'm
not a big enough target. Why not go after something with a bit more money,
like a sports gambling site [3]?
I mean, if this is the same Phantom Squad that took down XBox Live and
PlayStaton Network [4] over Christmas of 2015, then yes, this could be bad.
But as far as I could tell, that's the only attack Phantom Squad has done and
they've been very quiet since. This might even be a scam [5].
I talked with my hosting company, and they said not to worry. If it happens,
just give them a call and they can start working with their upstream provider
to mitigate the attack. And under no circumstance am I to pay the danegeld
[6] (which at the time of writing, 0.2 BTC is worth $802.46).
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/09/19.1
[2]
http://www.conman.org/
[3]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/12/17.1
[4]
http://news.softpedia.com/news/phantom-squad-starts-christmas-ddos-attacks-by-taking-down-ea-servers-498078.shtml
[5]
https://blogs.akamai.com/2017/04/low-risk-threat-ddos-extortion-letters.html
[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld
Email author at
[email protected]
