Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, June 28, 2016 edition of the Santonet Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich and the game recording from Salt Lake City, Utah.

In the last few months, I mentioned a couple times that companies receive DEDOS threats from individuals that claim to be associated with the Armada Collective.

I think there were also some from the Lizard Squad, both names that were associated with very strong DDoS attacks in the past.

But this time around, these threats did not actually lead to any attacks if the victim didn't

pay. Cloudflare now has a nice summary of some of these attacks.

Of course, Cloudflare defendants a lot of people against DDoS attacks and they heard from

their customers of about hundred different threats but

none of them according to Cloudflare led to an actual attacks the ransom that is

being requested in these cases is pretty steep it's a few thousand sometimes

tens of thousands of dollars of course has to be paid in Bitcoin.

And apparently the game here is that based on last year's wave of crippling attacks,

they hope that victims will just pay up even though these new actors don't have the capability to actually launch these attacks.

And sadly, this particular calculation often comes true.

False tax return filings have become one of the major ways how criminals that steal identities

have been able to monetize that information in recent years.

And the IRS, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, has struggled with actually preventing these fraudulent

filings. The main problem here is that the IRS will pay out refunds often before fully verifying

all the information in the return and then, well, if there turns out to be a problem

later, they come back to the taxpayer and try to get their money back.

Of course, this turns out to be rather difficult if the taxpayer didn't actually

file the fraudulent tax return. In the last couple of years, the IRS did issue what they

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