CYBERCRIMINALS are making a mint bringing e-commerce firms to a standstill with distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), according to the UK鈥檚 National Criminal Intelligence Service.
In a report issued on 3 August, called the 2005 UK Threat Assessment () the NCIS details cases from 2004 in which a gang based in Russia used a botnet, a network of virus-infected computers, to flood several online gambling websites with useless data, so they couldn鈥檛 trade with their users.
The extortionists鈥� botnet had a total bandwidth of 3 to 4 gigabits per second, exposing the firms鈥� servers to the equivalent of 200,000 emails per second. 鈥淭he attacks were soon followed by an extortion demand, often for no more than $5000,鈥� says the NCIS. 鈥淎s some companies were losing 拢100,000 an hour while under attack, many chose to pay up.鈥�
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