Cyber attackers hold two Estonian companies to ransom, demand Bitcoins
According to the Police and Border Guard Board, at least two Estonian companies have become victims of the latest cyber-attack, in which they also received an email demanding Bitcoins.
The cyber-criminals threatened in the emails that should they not received Bitcoins, more serious attacks will follow.
In both cases, the denial-of-service (DoS) attack was first committed against the official web pages of the respective companies. The businessmen then got an email which specified the account and deadline for transferring the Bitcoins – to avoid a more deadly ambush.
According to police representative, the cyber-attack lasted for about an hour. However, the attackers have not carried through their threats, despite the entrepreneurs not giving in to Bitcoin demands.
The police have started a criminal investigation.
DoS attack normally works by flooding a web server with requests for data to which it cannot respond as the return address has been forged, thereby keeping the connections open, stuck in a limbo of waiting for a response. Eventually a server will get stuck with so many half-open connections that there is nowhere for legitimate user requests to go, hence the denial of service.
Editor: S. Tambur
