Russian internet extortion gang cracked
 

The leaders of a gang alleged to have blackmailed internet betting sites after computerised attacks to disable their web servers have been arrested in Russia, law enforcers announced on Wednesday. The arrests mark the first success in tackling this new form of computerised crime.

The UK's National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) and counterparts in Russia tracked down three men suspected of running the extortion racket. The men were arrested in raids carried out in St Petersburg, Saratov and Stavropol in southwest Russia on Tuesday.

The gang is thought to have extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from betting firms around the world over the last year. It is impossible to determine an exact figure however because some sites may have failed to report incidents of extortion.

The group typically emailed demands for cash to a site after first demonstrating their ability to knock a site offline with a so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. These attacks are estimated to have cost sites millions of dollars in lost business.


Zombie machines


A DDoS assault involves bombarding the servers used to host a web site with fake packets of data, in order to render it inaccessible to normal users. Typically, hundreds or even thousands of "zombie" machines that have already been compromised by the attackers are used to carry out the attack.

Onslaughts against UK betting sites have escalated over the last nine months, the NHTCU says. This is partly because the sites have introduced countermeasures designed to halt them. For example, extra hardware installed in order to quickly identify and reject DDoS traffic.