Banks of South Korea are being threatened with a huge DDoS attack unless they pay $315,000 in Bitcoin. The attackers called themselves Armada Collective.
Yonhap news firm at South Korea said that the targeted organizations are KB Kookmin Bank, Shinhan Bank, Woori Bank, KEB Hana Bank, and NH Bank.
A researcher (Choi Sang-Myung) at Hauri cyber security group, said that these latest attacks might have been a result of the recent successful blackmail attempt of South Korean web hosting provider Nayana. For that, he said that the banks are well prepared to meet the attack, should it come.
“South Korea has paid large sums of money in the past to hackers. Earlier this month, the web hosting group Nayana paid about $ 1 million to unlock more than 3,400 sites under its domain, which is believed to be the largest payment made in the area of software extortion to date.”
Head of the IT team (Chung Ki-young) at South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) said:
The Financial Supervisory Service went into an emergency mode after seven banks received threatening emails from the Armada Collective. We are preparing for various ways to prevent a DDoS attack, including blocking unnecessary IP addresses, traffic dispersion and the implementation of a clean zone.