Direct Technology Group Blog

If you have never heard of a botnet, they are scary entities indeed. Imagine countless connected devices from all over the world, all joined together by malicious actors who want to use these infected devices to launch massive attacks against businesses, organizations, and governments. One such attack was launched by a Russian botnet consisting of millions of Internet of Things devices. Thanks to the efforts of the United States Department of Justice and various law enforcement agencies throughout Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, it has been brought to a halt.

Direct denial of service attacks are a major problem for businesses. On one hand, they’re difficult to prevent entirely, incredibly annoying, and costly. Hackers are realizing just how annoying DDoS attacks can be, and are capitalizing on them in order to both make a quick buck, and to take jabs at organizations that aren’t necessarily doing anything wrong.

Requesting a ransom from victims is an unfortunate trend gaining momentum in the hacking world. This is typically done using ransomware (where hackers encrypt data and request money for the key) and distributed denial of service attacks (where hackers threaten to overwhelm a system with traffic, thus knocking it offline). In both scenarios, hackers are looking for the victim to pay up, or else. Should they?