Ever heard of DDoS Extortion, the new trend in cyberattacks?

If you're a cybersecurity enthusiast, you've certainly heard of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. This is an old maneuver which is based on the fact that every server, regardless of how large or powerful it is, has a limit to how much Internet traffic it can handle until it goes down. A DoS attack is when a targeted server is ‘bombarded’ by millions or even trillions of requests over the internet in a short period of time in order to make it unavailable.

When the attack uses several different traffic sources, we say it is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Drawing a parallel, it's like hiring a battalion of people to enter a store all at once without buying anything — there won’t be enough space in the establishment to accommodate everyone and the sales people won't be able to attend everyone, causing the business to collapse. Got the idea?

In the early days of the web, DoS and DDoS attacks were generally considered harmless. This technique was mostly used by hacktivists, who used to take down newspaper and political party websites as a form of digital protest. There was even a little open-source program easily found on the web, which allowed anyone to perform a DoS attack with relative ease… Of course, you would only be successful if your connection was powerful enough.

Hand over the money or I'll shoot!

Now the scenario has changed. Over the past few years, DDoS attacks have become even more effective and deadly, thanks to the use of new techniques that increase the amount of traffic sent to overload a server. The main one is the use of botnets, with which cybercriminals infect computers, smartphones, and IoT devices unbeknownst to their owners and use the connections of these devices to increase their “firepower”, directing traffic from thousands of gadgets around the world to a single target, all at once.

It wasn't long before cybercrime caught on to this and created the attack we call DDoS Extortion. As its name suggests, in this type of attack the malicious actor threatens to carry out a distributed denial-of-service attack against a company's servers to take its website and/or applications down. If the administrator wants to keep their assets online, they need to pay the cybercriminal a certain “ransom” to leave them alone and go after a new victim.

And speaking of victims, the favorite targets of DDoS extortion attacks are mission-critical companies or companies whose core business relies 100% on their online presence. For an exclusively virtual store, for example, having its services unavailable for an entire day could cause a huge revenue loss. Likewise, industrial facilities and supply chains cannot allow their systems to go down, as this would impact third parties and create a domino effect.

Is this a new trend?

DDoS Extortion cases have increased during 2021, and it seems that they will continue to give headaches into 2022. Fortunately, there are several technical security solutions available on the market that can stop this type of attack. Microsoft recently claims to have successfully stopped a distributed denial-of-service attack that sent 2.4 terabytes of data per second to a server — that's 21.8 million requests per second, enough to take down a typical website.