Media reports that at least seven email providers have been hit by massive DDoS attacks since last week, resulting in long-term outages.
According to The Record, all of these attacks were orchestrated by the same attacker who extorted ransoms from their victims. DDoS started last Thursday, October 21 and continues to this day. The attacks mainly target small companies that provide security and privacy-focused email services: Runbox, Posteo, Fastmail, TheXYZ, Guerilla Mail, Kolab Now, and RiseUp.
Reporters write that shortly after the attacks, companies receive ransom emails of 0.06 BTC (about $ 4,000). The hacker, who signed up as Cursed Patriarch, gives victims three days to pay and otherwise threatens to take the victim’s services offline for a long time.
Posteo also confirms in its blog that it received threats, and the attackers extort money from it, but Posteo refused to pay. Similar statements can be seen on the Runbox and TheXYZ blogs.
The peak values of attacks, according to victims, reached 50 and 256 Gbps.
The Record notes that these incidents are not related to the recent ransomware DDoS attacks against VoIP provider Voipfone and game server provider Sparked. According to the publication’s own sources, these attacks were carried out by different attackers.
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