Ladies and gentlemen, THIS is the definition of gansta!
Eran Reshef had an idea in the battle against spam e-mail that seemed to be working: he fought spam with spam. Today, he'll give up the fight.
Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time.
That led to a flood of Internet traffic so heavy that it disrupted the spammers' ability to send e-mails to other victims -- a crippling effect that caused a handful of known spammers to comply with the requests.
Then, earlier this month, a Russia-based spammer counterattacked, Reshef said. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it blocked legitimate visitors from going to Bluesecurity.com, as well as to other Web sites. The spammer also sent another message: Cease operations or Blue Security customers will soon find themselves targeted with virus-filled attacks.
Today, Reshef will wave a virtual white flag and surrender. The company will shut down this morning and its Web site will display a message informing its customers about the closure.
"The Russians" hijacked computers, sent the hijacked computers commands to connect to Blue Security computers at such a pace that it created a denial of service to the company's systems. The translation is, earlier, they sent viruses to computers which were unpatched or unprotected, infected the computers, and turned those computers into bad guys at their will.
Think about this for a moment.
"The Russians" decide to get more money and contact a company like E*Trade, who does most of its business via the Internet. They threaten the company with an attack unless they provide money and or services. To show they are not playing and that it is possible, they initiate a short DoS attack on E*Trade. What do you think E*Trade would do?
Here is the serious part. What makes anyone think the scenario has not already happened?
There are plenty of companies that have had serious IT problems because of virus attacks, untargeted and targeted. Personally, I know of 3 major technical companies whose web presence was shutdown because of untargeted and targeted attacks. It was interesting seeing an employee log into the company employee portal, only to see graphic porn images stream all over the computer.
People, what "The Russians" did was straight up gansta. Blue Security thought they were bad. "The Russians" showed what BAD is.
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