Three unnamed Greek banks are under attack. They are currently being held ransom by a hacker group which calls itself the Armada Collective. Their first demands were made last Thursday and to prove that they are serious, they launched a distributed denial of service (DdoS) attack against the three banks' websites.
The initial attacks were successful in disrupting transactions in all banks, The Verge reported. The DdoS attacks are just beginning and the Armada Collective is threatening to take these websites down permanently. The Armada Collective has also publicly announced their demands: each bank is to pay them 20,000 Bitcoin or the equivalent of $7,208,200 or the attacks will continue.
It is reported that the banks are not caving under the pressure. Instead, they are beefing up their defenses against these DdoS attacks. The central bank of Greece, together with the police electronic crime unit, are also monitoring the systems of the affected banks.
The Armada Collective has apparently been in business for a while already. Apparently, DdoS extortion attempts have been made against several email providers earlier in this year. Financial Times noted that the Swiss government sent out a warning that Armada Collective tried to extort from email providers last September. ProtonMail, HushMail, VFEMail, and RunBox were all similarly blackmailed as well.
It must be explicitly said that authorities are unable to verify if the group attacking the Greek banks are really the same group or simply copycats.The difficulty in finding out the identities of these hackers is compounded by the fact that DdoS attacks are easier than ever to carry out.
Automated tools that coordinate attacks come cheaply nowadays and can be initiated, quite literally, with a press of a button. One good example is the Lizard Squad. This group favors the use of DdoS attacks and actually put its tools up for rent this year. This same tool was able to successfully bring down the Xbox Live and Playstation network earlier this year.
