Hackers make DDoS threats to extort Greek banks

A group of hackers is trying to extort money from three Greek banks and is threatening the financial institutions with DDoS attacks unless they comply.

The group, which goes by the name Armada Collective, has asked the three banks which weren’t named, to pay a ransom in Bitcoin or face a distributed denial of service attack.

They had sent websites of all three banks offline briefly, just to show they mean business. At the same time, law enforcement agencies and telecoms have stepped in to help, according to local media, with a number of service providers increasing capacity for the banks to handle traffic, while law enforcement have created a special taskforce to deal with the attack.

The taskforce made up of the Greek National Intelligence Service, Financial Crimes Squad and Bank of Greece.

The banks said that online banking is interrupted, but the banks’ financial transaction systems are unaffected.

According to Greek financial journalist Yannis Koutsomitis, evne the FBI is involved.

The attack comes less than a week after a similar thing happened to UAE-based bank, when a hacker going by the name Hacker Buba, blackmailed the bank and asked for $3 million.

In that case, however, there were no DDoS threats, but instead the hacker threatened to release the bank’s customers’ account statements.

Customers include government entities, private companies and individuals. As it turned out, the bank refused to pay and the hacker kept his word to start doxing confidential bank statements via Twitter.

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