14 DAY TRIAL // BTCC is the latest victim of the Bitcoin-for-DDoS extortion scheme, but unfortunately for the attacker, the company was financially capable of implementing better DDoS protection measures and make the attacker go away.
The first DDoS attack took place on December 31, as Crypto Currency News reports, and seemed to be quite small in capacity. As soon as the attack ended, the company, a well-known Bitcoin trader, received a ransom email from the (currently unknown) attacker.
The email warned the company of more DDoS attacks unless they'd pay a ransom of 1 Bitcoin (around $425). On January 1, the attacker continued its assault, launching a 10 Gbps attack.
BTCC decides to invest in better servers, rather than pay the ransom
According to a topic on Reddit opened by a user that claimed to have received the information from a BTCC representative, this attack was much more powerful than the first and knocked the site offline for a few moments.
BTCC said that the company's DDoS mitigation service did not expect such a large attack on the site, but BTCC quickly upgraded to a better protection plan. During this incident, the attacker requested a payment of 10 Bitcoin ($,4250).
Because BTCC refused to pay again, the attacker launched another attack, which resulted only in a partial loss of functionality to BTCC's service. The attackers followed with another email.
"We will keep these attacks up until you pay! The price is now 30 BTC. You had better pay up before you go bankrupt! Mwa ha ha!" read the ransom note.
Attacker gives in, admits defeat
Following this latest email, instead of giving in, BTCC upgraded their servers instead, and continued to ignore the ransom notes.
Quickly after, the attacks restarted, but this time around, BTCC barely registered any downtime.
Admitting defeat, the attacker sent the following email: "Hey, guys, look, I'm really a nice person. I don't want to put you all out of business. What do you say we just make it 0.5 BTC and call it even?"
After BTCC ignored this email as well, the attacker sent another one that read: "Do you even speak English?" and later stopped the attacks and any attempts of blackmail.