Hong Kong Banks Targeted By DDOS Attacks, Bitcoin Payout Demanded

Two of the largest Hong Kong banks were targeted with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks earlier this week by unknown parties demanding bitcoin ransoms. Regional newspaper The Standard reported that the Bank of China (Hong Kong) and the Bank of East Asia were hit by the attacks last weekend. A representative for Bank of China confirmed that the attack took place on 9th May, telling CoinDesk: "With our constant monitoring mechanism and contingency measures in place to ensure the security and operation of the Company's website, our services and customer information have not been....

“DD4BC,” a cybercriminal group that has launched distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks on bitcoin mining companies, exchanges and Hong Kong Banks since mind-2014, have begun to target financial institutions including brokerages, banks and financial organization in Europe, Australia and U.S. According to Akamai, a Massachusetts based content delivery network, DD4BC has carried out 87 attacks specifically on financial institutions, and have shifted its focus from bitcoin startups to banks and financial organizations over the past few months. During the last three months, the hacking....

A number of privacy-oriented email service providers have been targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) extortionists demanding payment in bitcoin. Hushmail, ProtonMail and Runbox, among other services, were targeted by an entity calling itself the Armada Collective. The group was the subject of a warning from earlier this fall by the Swiss Governmental Computer Emergency Response Team, a national agency dedicated to cybersecurity issues. Blog posts from the email providers indicate that the attacks took place between 3rd and 6th November. In the case of ProtonMail, the service....

AntPool, BW.com, NiceHash, CKPool and GHash.io are among a number of bitcoin mining pools and operations that have been hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks in recent days. The incidents appear to have begun in the first week of March. For example, on 11th March, AntPool owner Bitmain sent an email to customers disclosing the DDOS attacks and advising external pool users to set up failsafe pools in the event of an outage. According to many of the companies affected by the incidents, those behind the attacks demanded payment in bitcoin in return for stopping the attacks.....

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....