South Korea's Kookmin Bank and seven other banks were extorted for Bitcoin by a hacker group

[TechWeb Report] On June 23, according to foreign media reports, hacker groups demanded that seven major banks in South Korea pay a ransom, otherwise they would launch an attack. The Financial Supervisory Service of South Korea has entered an "emergency state" to prevent attacks.

A hacker group known as the Armada Collective said on Wednesday it would launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on seven major South Korean banks if the banks failed to pay a ransom in the virtual currency Bitcoin.

The hackers sent threats via email to seven banks, including South Korea's five largest banks: Korea Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, Woori Bank, KEB Hana Bank and Nonghyup Bank, demanding that they pay a ransom worth about $300,000 by Monday at the latest.

The head of the IT team of the Financial Supervisory Service of South Korea told foreign media that after seven banks received threatening emails from the Invincible Armada organization, the Financial Supervisory Service entered a state of emergency. We are preparing various methods to prevent DDoS attacks, including blocking unnecessary IP addresses, dispersing traffic, and setting up a clean zone.

So-called "clean zones" are a defensive measure that seeks to defuse DDoS attacks by redirecting traffic from a targeted website to sites that have the capacity to handle the volume.

DDoS attacks are a common form of cyberattack that overwhelms and disables websites by directing huge amounts of traffic to a target.

Since reports of the Armada group began to emerge early last year, the hacker group is believed to have extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies around the world, though some believe the threats were largely empty and that the impact of DDoS attacks is often smaller than many other attacks, such as the WannaCry ransomware.

The WannaCry virus wreaked havoc around the world on a weekend in May, causing more than 200,000 Windows computers in more than 100 countries to be infected, affecting various organizations around the world, including French car manufacturers, Russian banks and Spanish telecom operators, and attracted worldwide attention. Important data in netizens' computers was encrypted by the virus, and hackers could only recover it by paying a ransom. (Song Xing)