The world of the Bitcoin is overall looking a lot more positive. Every day we see more and more reports of startups and well-established companies using the Bitcoin or its technology in their company and as a micro-payment solution it is probably the best around at the time.
But not everything is perfect in the Bitcoin world, far from it. Since the beginning there has been blackmarket darknet sites who has been using Bitcoins as a payment method for illegal drugs, weapons and other things that regular people would not be buying.
There has also been extortion done on companies, where Bitcoin payments has been preferred as a method to pay the ransom to get the attacks to stop. This seems to have ramped up lately, especially with a group known as “DD4BC” who has been attacking several financial companies.
Akami has explained the issue very well in a recent blog post, where they tell more about exactly what sort of power that the group has to attack with, which industries they target the most and how exactly they go about the attacks in terms of wanting Bitcoins and such.
DD4BC is very well known in the online Bitcoin community, as well as in financial industries, due to their many attacks the past year. Nobody has found any information on who is behind the group, where they are from or anything else, which has made it impossible for companies to report it to the authorities.
The group will initially start out a small attack on a single ip or server with a limited version of their power, where they will send the company an email at the same time to explain to them what is happening and try to get them to pay a one-time fee in Bitcoins, ranging from 40-50 Bitcoins.
However if the company chooses not to pay, then they will be in serious trouble. The group will then launch full scale attacks on the company and the Bitcoin ransom will go up and up until they decide to pay the extortion fee.
Heimdal Security has also made a blog post about DD4BC, where they give an example of how the group will contact the company initially and how they threaten the companies to pay.
The main issue in all of this from a company perspective is that nobody wants their services to be down and it may be the easiest way to get rid of the problem to simply pay. It is also a problem that nobody really knows where they can go to report crime of this matter and they might not know how to safeguard against it happening again.
From a Bitcoin community point-of-view, it is an issue that the currency that we are all working for people to respect is being used to extort companies, which gives the Bitcoin a bad reputation and will not gain our course at all. Hopefully it will be possible to stop these attacks once and for all in the future.
