'Pay or your network gets it' threat to Kiwi organisations

An unknown international group has begun threatening several New Zealand organisations with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, according to the New Zealand Internet Task Force (NZITF).

DDoS attacks are attempts to make an organisation's Internet links or network unavailable to its users for an extended length of time.

The NZITF says these latest DDoS threats appear as an email threatening to take down an organisation's internet links unless substantial payments in the digital currency Bitcoin are made.

Barry Brailey, NZITF chair, warns the threat is not an idle one and should be taken extremely seriously as the networks of some New Zealand organisations have already been targeted.

"The networks of at least four New Zealand organisations that NZITF knows of have been affected, so far," Brailey says. "A number of Australian organisations have also been affected.

Brailey says the 'unknown group of criminals' has been sending emails to a number of addresses within an organisation. Sometimes these are support or helpdesk addresses, other times they are directed at individuals.

According to the NITF, the emails contain statements threatening DDoS, such as:

"Your site is going under attack unless you pay 25 Bitcoin.

"We are aware that you probably don't have 25 BTC at the moment, so we are giving you 24 hours.

"IMPORTANT: You don't even have to reply. Just pay 25 BTC to – we will know it's you and you will never hear from us again.

The emails may also provide links to news articles about other attacks the group has conducted.

NZITF urges all New Zealand firms and organisations to be on the alert and to consider the following:

• Don't pay. "Even if this stops a current attack, it makes your organisation a likely target for future exploitation as you have a history of making payments," it says.  • Educate all staff to be on the lookout for any emails matching the descriptions above. "Have them alert appropriate security personnel within the organisation as soon as possible." • Establish points of contact with your Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the event that you need them to perform traffic filtering. NZITF says defense against many attack types is most effective when performed before it reaches your network. To date NZITF has had reports of organisations being able to handle these attacks effectively through collaboration with their ISPs. • Establish a baseline of normal activity on your internal network to determine uncharacteristic levels of internet traffic in the event of an attack. Report any attack to the appropriate authorities.

For more tech savvy organisations, the NZITF provides some additional steps to consider: • Make use of DDoS mitigation services or content delivery networks to serve web content. Solutions that specialise in protecting web content may be more cost effective and, given the limited types of traffic that should be allowed, might be able to more aggressively drop malicious traffic. • For DDoS attacks conducted over non-critical services (especially SSDP and NTP), blocking the relevant ports may provide temporary mitigation.