More websites hit by Armada Collective DDoS blackmail attacks, but won't pay up

Graham Cluley | November 10, 2015
 
An online criminal gang calling itself the "Armada Collective" has been demanding that online businesses pay thousands of dollars in Bitcoins, or face having their websites brought to their knees by crippling internet attacks.
 
And, as the DDoS experts at Akamai point out, it is online companies who have the most to lose from downtime who are at the greatest risk.
 
From: "Armada Collective" armadacollective@openmailbox.orgTo: abuse@victimdomain; support@victimdomain; info@victimdomainSubject: Ransom request: DDOS ATTACK!FORWARD THIS MAIL TO WHOEVER IS IMPORTANT IN YOUR COMPANY AND CAN MAKE DECISION!We are Armada Collective.All your servers will be DDoS-ed starting Friday if you don't pay 20 Bitcoins @ XXXWhen we say all, we mean all - users will not be able to access sites host with you at all.Right now we will start 15 minutes attack on your site's IP (victims IP address). It will not be hard, we will not crash it at the moment to try to minimize eventual damage, which we want to avoid at this moment. It's just to prove that this is not a hoax. Check your logs!If you don't pay by Friday , attack will start, price to stop will increase to 40 BTC and will go up 20 BTC for every day of attack.If you report this to media and try to get some free publicity by using our name, instead of paying, attack will start permanently and will last for a long time.This is not a joke.Our attacks are extremely powerful - sometimes over 1 Tbps per second. So, no cheap protection will help.Prevent it all with just 20 BTC @ XXXDo not reply, we will probably not read. Pay and we will know its you. AND YOU WILL NEVER AGAIN HEAR FROM US!Bitcoin is anonymous, nobody will ever know you cooperated. 
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