According to Raspi News, the Russian Interior Ministry announced on Thursday that the young man would reveal the targets of the DDoS attacks through posts on Twitter and a group of hackers would carry them out.
The Twitter feed of the 19-year-old is quite short, as the account was created in late March under the handle Pump Water (@PumpWaterReboot). It contains 14 messages, most of them naming victims of the distributed denial-of-service attacks. The account recorded no activity since the middle of April.
“Hackers who call themselves Pump Water Reboot organized massive distributed DDoS-attacks on a number of websites including the resources of three major Russian banks, information agency websites, print media, telecommunications companies and even an anti-virus lab,” the ministry’s statement says, as per the aforementioned news publication.
Among the popular websites targeted by the incidents were Habrahabr, RuTracker, Freelansim. In the case of RuTracker, the ransom demand was $3,000 / €2,230.
In order to stop the cyber-assault, the perpetrators would demand a ransom of $1,000 / €743, which was also announced through Twitter. The teen faces a sentence of up to seven years behind bars for the extortion offense.