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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Friday, July 23, 2004
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DDoS hackers arrested Posted by Mikko @ 20:57 GMT

One of the hot topics over the last months has been the continuing DDoS & extortion attacks against mostly UK-based gambling sites.

According to a recent article in The Financial Times (titled "Internet gambling extortion racket broken up"), three men in their early 20s were arrested in raids in Russia.

Apparently they were launching big DDoS attacks from botnets against gambling sites, then emailing them and asking $50,000 for not doing it again.

The extortion money was rerouted to Russia via Caribbean and Latvia, but nevertheless the UK police was able to trace it, leading eventually to the arrests.

So...so far, the year looks pretty good:

Month  Country
July   Russia: Three DDoS hackers arrested
June  Hungary: Magold virus author sentenced
June  Finland: VBS/Lasku virus author arrested
May   Taiwan: Peep backdoor author arrested
May   Canada: Randex variant author arrested
May   Germany: Agobot variant author arrested
May   Germany: Sasser & Netsky author arrested