Major financial institutions in the UK are being blackmailed by Bitcoin extortion groups

     According to reports, since last year, many large British companies and organizations, including Lloyds Bank and BAE Systems, have been attacked by distributed denial of service from the Bitcoin extortion group DD4BC. A cybersecurity case study released by Akamai shows that since April this year, there have been 114 DD4BC extortions on the company's customers, 41 of which occurred in June alone, and only 5 in January and February this year.

     "The latest wave of cyberattacks, primarily targeting the financial services industry, has employed a number of new strategies and tactics designed to publicly harass, extort and ultimately embarrass victims," ​​Stuart Schickel, Akamai's head of security, said in a news release.

     According to Akamai, 58% of the targets of the DD4BC extortion group are financial institutions. The DD4BC extortion group will initially send random extortion emails, stating that the extortion amount is often between 1 and 100 Bitcoins (approximately £160 to £16,000), and will also state the deadline for handing over the Bitcoins and warn that this is just a "small public attack." Once the victim refuses to cooperate, they will increase the amount and issue more powerful threats to the victim. This method is particularly effective when extorting financial institutions because the DD4BC extortion group threatens to publicly extort, damage the reputation of the financial institutions, and weaken their credibility.

     Akamai's report also shows that the DD4BC scam group is using this typical scripted extortion method found in the distributed denial of service for hire market, and mainly uses three methods to attack: NTP (Network Time Protocol) disaster, SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol) disaster and UDP (Network User Data Protocol) disaster. The current maximum attack intensity is about 56.2Gbps. Akamai warned that various copycat bond groups may also join the melee. Fortunately, because the DD4BC scam group has shifted its targets to enterprise-level organizations, law enforcement agencies seem to have finally started to pay attention. The UK National Crime Agency became the target of the distributed denial of service of the hacker group Lizard Squad last week. The UK National Crime Agency said it had "noticed" the activities of the organization.

     Many companies have complied with the extortion group DD4BC. But one victim has tried a different approach, offering the group a large bounty of 100 bitcoins (£16,000) for details of who is behind the scheme. Bitman, a major manufacturer of bitcoin storage devices, has been extorted for 10 bitcoins . So far, the bounty has not been claimed, despite a number of potential candidates.