Playing the Dirty Field of DDoS for Digital Currencies

Source: http://www.digitalmoneyworld.com/playing-the-dirty-field-of-ddos-for-digital-currencies/

Playing the Dirty Field of DDoS for Digital Currencies

by Benson on January 3rd, 2008

Facing problems logging onto Liberty Reserve for the past few weeks?

Liberty Reserve has received an email from a hacker group,

(patrkell@fastem.com) wrote:Hello, We are an anonymous hacking group, we have received a payment form a company named v-money, to DDoS your website and destroy your business, v-money have sent a payment for 7000 $ for the ddos service, if you desire for 8000 $ we stop this attack, e-gold only accepted, today our hackers team start with the ddos in a intermittent way, if we not receive a positive answer and e-gold payment today the attack will be increased, on time to time basis.

What’s DDoS Attacks?

Photo Credit: Jay, This is how it looks like when you get DDoSed (Chances are you’ll never get to see it)

Liberty Reserve’s site has been sluggish of late (signs of DDoS attacks) and there’re warnings from the Support on their blog that they might be experiencing DDoS attacks. Now for people who do not understand what DDoS is, here’s a brief explanation from Wiki:

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally comprises the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

Simply put that the anonymous group is attacking Liberty Reserve’s site with loads of traffic to bring it down. What it means for Liberty Reserve users:

1. Unable to login to account
2. Possible confusion if you are spending and halfway through, the website loads a blank page
3. Unable to receive any funds on your LR account
4. Merchants unable to accept LR payments, meaning loss of possible business transactions

In all, its a huge mess. Reliability is something that a Digital Currency MUST have.

Is there anything a DDoS attacked site can do?

Yes! A simple solution could be engaging expensive DDoS protection service from Prolexic, the best in anti-DDoS business with clients like e-Gold in its list. There are many other companies offering DDoS solutions as well.

Filtering out the traffic won’t help, I have experience with a few attacks previously on a few websites of mine and it isn’t easy. Also, you might filter out innocent customer’s IP addresses if you’re not good at it.

V-Money Attacking Liberty Reserve?

You won’t know whether it’s true. V-money is new in this digital currency business and they might have done it since Liberty Reserve is a competitor. For a hacking group to use such kind of taunting method is pretty normal.

After all, like burglars and kidnappers, they will never stop.