Ashley Carman reports:
Three unnamed Greek banks are the most recent victims of an extortion campaign in which a hacker group is attempting to fully take down their websites. The group, calling itself the Armada Collective, apparently made its first demand on Thursday of last week, at which point it also launched the first of its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Those attacks succeeded in disrupting transactions at every bank, the Financial Times reported. DDoS attacks overload websites’ servers in an effort to take them fully offline, and the Armada Collective has a set price to stop its efforts: each bank must pay 20,000 Bitcoin, or $7,208,200. The financial institutions aren’t bending under pressure, however, and are instead strengthening their DDoS defenses. Greece’s central bank and its police electronic crime unit are also monitoring the banks’ computer systems.
Read more on The Verge.