Companies have paid more than $100,000 in bitcoin as ransom to a group of blackmailers in order to prevent cyberattacks. In fact, fraudsters have not made a single hack.

The group of alleged hackers, who call themselves Armada Collective, have been sending messages to various businesses, threatening to break into their systems unless they pay a ransom. Cybercriminals insisted on using bitcoins as a payment method. Their typical letter reads:

“Your network will be DDoS-ed starting [date] if you don't pay protection fee — 10 Bitcoins @ [Bitcoin Address]. If you don't pay by [date], attack will start, yours service going down permanently price to stop will increase to 20 BTC and will go up 10 BTC for every day of attack.”

The message normally ends with a threat “This is not a joke”. However, according to CloudFlare experts, if not a joke, most likely it was a cheat. CloudFlare checked notes in order to find any correlation with data from DDoS mitigation services and have not detected any attacks on behalf of the Armada Collective. In addition, the self-appointed hackers have shown very little experience in blackmailing as they requested their victims to send same amounts of money to the same bitcoin addresses, making it difficult to track who paid the ransom and when.

However simple the trick was, a lot of businesses around the world preferred to pay to the extorters. According to CloudFlare, Armada Collective has received more than $100,000 over the past two months.

“I'm hopeful this article will start appearing near the top of search results and help organizations act more rationally when they receive such a threat,” CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince wrote to Ars Technica.

Over the last year, the number of ransomware cyberattacks has grown rapidly. The most famous case took place in Hollywood, where a medical centre was forced to pay $17 million in bitcoins to extortionists, who hacked into their system. Later the first ransomware virus attacked Apple devices which had never suffered from such attacks before.

According to the report by Cyber Threat Alliance, the hacker group standing behind one of the most successful extorter malware Cryptowall 3.0 caused the damage estimated at about $325 million. Last June, according to FBI, US citizens lost more than $18 million to virus attacks.

Elena Platonova