Cyberattackers bury ransom demands in recent DDoS attacks
Blockchain One of the most common, and irritating, cyber attacks — the distributed-denial-of-service (or DDoS) — now has the potential to grow with a twist of cryptocurrency mining. Security researchers with the internet services company Akamai have noticed something unusual as they've responded to a spate of recent DDoS attacks. Buried beneath the traffic deluge designed to grind a target's web traffic to a halt are ransom notes. "It’s actually like a DDoS strike with a phishing attack with an extortion charge all rolled into one," said Chad Seaman, a senior engineer with Akamai's security intelligence acknowledgment team, in an interview with Fortune. "When we saw it we moved like, huh, clever bastards." One note shared with Fortune, buried in an otherwise indecipherable string of code, makes a demand for "50 XMR," or Monero. As of March 3, 2018, that amount of Monero is worth roughly $18,000. It's not uncommon for DDoS at...