Priya Anand reports:
More than 100 companies, including targets from big banks to brokerages in the financial sector, have received distributed denial of service threats since about April, says Richard Jacobs, assistant special agency in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s New York office. With these types of attacks, known as DDoS, criminals jam websites by flooding them with useless traffic.
The ransom requests typically run in the tens of thousands of dollars and in some cases, the companies have paid up, Jacobs said.
Read more on MSN.