The closing months of 2021 saw a flurry of ransomware cases involving distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.
DDOS attacks are popular with criminals because they don’t require an actual hack of a company. They simply jam the system so that the network becomes overloaded. Then the threat actor demands a ransom payment to unlock the system.
“A DDOS attack targets a website or other online service,” writes cybersecurity lawyer Jena M. Valdetero. “The attacker attempts to flood a targeted service with traffic by using numerous compromised computer systems, including IoT devices, as sources of attack traffic. Think of a DDOS attack like your home phone from the 1980s. If multiple callers are constantly calling your number, legitimate callers will get a constant busy signal. The goal, of course, is to get a company to pay the threat actors to stop the attack and resume normal operations.”
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DDOS campaigns are becoming a go-to strategy for cyber-extortionists, according to Valdetero, a shareholder with Greenberg Traurig. They usuallt take one of two forms:
“First, as an add-on to a ransomware attack,” she writes. “Ransomware attacks have evolved over the past several years beyond simply encrypting a company’s servers and endpoints, to increasingly exfiltrating and threatening to publicly post or sell company data, to now threatening and/or committing DDOS attacks. Second, certain threat actors are skipping the ransomware attack and heading straight to the threat of a DDOS attack.”
Sometimes, the threat is a bluff.
“Fortunately, some of these actors are bluffing and lack the resources to conduct a full-blown attack,” according to Valdetero. “They may instead hit a company’s network with a short burst of traffic, and then will use that burst to suggest they have much more firepower behind them. Others, however, are conducting full-blown attacks.”
Source: Uptick in Distributed Denial of Service Attacks During Holidays (natlawreview.com)
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