Someone is using the ‘Cozy Bear’ moniker to scare DDoS victims into bitcoin payments
It looks like scammers are impersonating one of Russia’s most notorious hacking groups in order to extort victims out of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin. Multiple companies have reported to the security vendor Akamai that they were hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack, which degrades victims’ web services by overwhelming them with fake traffic. After a brief DDoS hit, victims say they receive an extortion note from a group claiming to be Cozy Bear, a state-sponsored Russian hacking group. The scheme works like this: attackers launch the DDoS attack from a botnet, in which each IP in the botnet sends a fraction of the overall traffic to the target. The victim has a deadline, typically six days, to pay two bitcoin. If they don’t pay by the time the deadline expires, the fee increases by one bitcoin per day, and the DDoS resumes. Cozy Bear is best known for […]
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