What do you do when the internet turns into the Wild West? You adopt strategies similar to those used in the Wild West. Now that’s exactly what one of the United Kingdom based computers and electronics ecommerce platform, Aria Technology has resorted to. The company has announced a reward of GBP 15000 to those who have any information about the cybercriminals who targeted the site.
Aria Technology was one of the companies whose website came under DDoS attack on Monday. The other affected sites belonged to Scan Computers and Novatech. The attack was later confirmed to be bitcoin based DDoS attack by Aria Taheri, the owner and managing director of Aria Technology. He also stated that the hackers had sent an email demanding a ransom of 16.66 BTC which is close to GBP 3000. They had further threatened to bring down the site on Wednesday if the ransom was not paid.
However, things didn’t go the way hackers expected it to go after Aria Taheri decided not to pay the ransom and posted a reward for those who help identify the hackers responsible for the DDoS attack. The total reward is 5 times the original ransom demanded by the attackers.
Aria Taheri after refusing to pay ransom was quoted on CRN saying –
“We are not going to encourage more of these hackers by giving them Bitcoins, because that would only encourage others to come to us and blackmail us more. The message to the hackers is that I will spend a significant amount of money to bring them to justice. Our track record shows that we have done that before, and based on that track record I am fairly confident we can do that [again].”
He also assured the customers that the hackers just made the website inaccessible and all customer data is 100 percent secure with the company.
This is not the first time for Aria Taheri as his firm was earlier attacked in February 2013 and they successfully caught the perpetrators by declaring a reward for information about the people behind the hack.