Hackers threaten to take down websites of Hong Kong banks unless they pay bitcoin ransoms
City's financial institutions are falling prey to cybercriminals who threaten to disable servers unless they pay up in bitcoins, experts say
Hackers have targeted banking institutions in Hong Kong with server-disabling attacks, threatening to take down their services unless they receive ransom payments, experts said on Thursday.
According to web security and performance firm Akamai, a group of cybercriminals known as DD4BC have been targeting websites in Asia and around the world with more than 100 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since at least September 2014.
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The attackers then demanded payment in the untraceable cryptocurrency bitcoin to stop the DDoS attacks, which can take down servers and cost businesses thousands of dollars per hour to fight against.
"DD4BC has been using the threat of DDoS attacks to secure bitcoin payments from its victims for protection against future attacks," said Akamai senior vice president Stuart Scholly.
"The latest attacks – focused primarily on the financial service industry – involved new strategies and tactics intended to harass, extort and ultimately embarass the victim publicly."
A spokeswoman for the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city's defacto central bank, would not comment on specific cases or attack methods.
