Hello, welcome to the Monday, July 10th, 2017 edition of the Sands and its Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and the day I'm recording from Stockholm, Germany.

Let's start with a couple of diaries from this weekend.

On Friday, Renato wrote about another wave, sort of of these DDo's extortion demands. They had

covered them about two weeks ago. Back then, they were pretty much all totally fake. Nothing

really happened if you didn't pay. This new wave is a little bit different. Now, they still

claim to come from the Armada collective.

Of course, that particular group is pretty much defunct, but I guess they're sort of using that brand

in order to make people more likely to comply with their demands. The other thing that is

different here is that they offer actually a demonstration of their firepower.

And we do have a couple of reports where people reported they actually saw these pretty short,

usually 15 minute long denial of service attacks happen. And that, of course, then it gets

people to pay up for the demand however

the other report we also got from the people that they did experience in these

initial denial of service attacks was that they weren't really all that large

definitely not as large as promised in the emails so if you have a half a decent anti-denial of service strategy,

you should be fine against this kind of attack. Now, of course, it is important that you do have

a plan to deal with denial of service attacks anyway. So that's probably the best way to spend your effort and money

to not pay the ransom. Some of these demands were actually quite expensive, sort of in the 10

Bitcoin range, which is sort of $10,000, $20,000 these days. And once you pay, then of course, they know that you are a willing victim and that you will

pay again.

So likely they'll just come back and ask for more money or for another payment in a couple of

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