Hackers behind OP and Danske Bank Cyber-Attack Demanded Bitcoins
Hackers behind the cyber-attack on OP-Pohjola and Danske Bank were demanding around 110 Bitcoins in ransom, according to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). Sometime around the New Year, the customers of both the said banks started complaining about the difficulties in login in to their respective accounts, especially of OP who were trying to access their accounts from outside Finland. The online service halt, led by this supposedDDoS attack, remained in effect for more than a week. Meanwhile, the law authorities continued to locate the source which initiated it. A couple....
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On May 9, an international group of hackers launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on two of the largest financial institutions in Hong Kong. Hong Kong police confirmed that they have received reports from the Bank of China and the Bank of East Asia claiming that the hackers demanded payments in bitcoin. "The two institutions later received emails demanding payments in bitcoins, or there would be another round of attacks," a spokesman said. According to The Standard Hong Kong, the hackers overwhelmed the websites of the two banks with traffic from multiple sources, causing....
Note: there has been some confusion regarding Danske Bank's involvement with this service. Danske Bitcoin is a service independently run by BIPS, and there are no formal agreements between BIPS and Danske Bank to facilitate the offering of this service. BIPS, a Bitcoin payment processor based in Canada and Denmark, has just announced a new service: Danske Bitcoin, allowing users with Danske Bank's MobilePay service to instantly buy bitcoins from their phone. MobilePay an iPhone and Android application that allows anyone with a Danish bank account and credit card (and is over 15 years of....
Bitcoin, a wonderful creation of this century has two faces. One which is helping the unbanked and underbanked across the world gain access to financial services by making money transfer and transactions affordable and another on the dark side being the most favoured currency among the criminal kind. Gone were the days when criminals demanded hard cash or a wire transfer to some offshore bank account outside the jurisdiction of the country they were operating in. They have graduated, become savvy enough to demand bitcoins instead. Why bitcoins? Because it is easier to move bitcoin than....
In another update on hacking incidents putting bitcoin payments in a negative light, a group of banks in Hong Kong suffered a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack and are being demanded for bitcoin payouts in exchange. The Bank of China and the Bank of East Asia reported this incident to the Hong Kong authorities who are already conducting investigations on the matter. News reports indicate that these financial institutions suffered website outages, as hackers overwhelmed the sites with traffic from multiple sources. This sparked irregular spikes in online traffic, forcing some of....
Authorities in Greece have banded together a special team of cyber sleuths to safeguard Greek banks from cyber-attacks after a malicious hacker group demanded a bitcoin ransom with the threat of further DDoS attacks. In yet another instance of the infamous hacked group 'Armada Collective' targeting banks, the online operations of three Greek banks were rendered offline for a few hours last week, in a demonstration of their malicious hacking abilities. The group threated to attack again unless the banks paid a bitcoin ransom before Monday. The deadline is today, as reported by Greek....