An individual or group claiming to be “Anonymous” or “Lizard Squad” sent extortion emails to private-sector companies threatening to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on their network unless they received an identified amount of Bitcoin. No victims to date have reported DDoS activity as a penalty for non-payment.
The exploitation of the “Internet of Things” (IOT) to conduct small-to-large scale attacks on the private industry will very likely continue due to the open availability of the malware source codes for targeting IoT devices and insufficient IoT device security.
One of the most significant cyber threats to businesses, local and federal government agencies is the Distributed-Denial-of-Service attack (DDoS). A Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) occurs when an attacker commands a number of computers to send numerous requests to a target computer. The overwhelming flood of requests to the website or computer network can cause it to shut down or fail to handle the requests of legitimate users, much like a rush hour traffic jam on the freeway. This type of attack can completely disrupt an organization’s operations until the network is able to be restored. Understanding the basic concept and methods of a DDoS attack can help operators of both large and small networks mitigate the severity of the attack.
A December 2015 presentation from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team Cyber Threat Information Sharing Branch on distributed denial-of-service attacks launched by the Armada Collective.
Disruptive cyber attacks by criminal hackers—primarily distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks—targeting local law enforcement websites have increased since August 2014. We judge that this is almost certainly a result of the heightened coverage surrounding the alleged use of excessive force by law enforcement and an increased focus on incidents of perceived police brutality. The primary impact from the majority of these attacks has been the temporary disruption of the targeted public-facing websites.