OnlineDomain has reported an attempted fraud which targets domain name registrants in the US national domain .US. Since the middle of last week, registrants have received emails with the following message: “We are Anonymous hackers group.
Your site *********.US will be DDoS-ed starting in 24 hours if you don’t pay only 0.1 Bitcoins @ 18z*****************************
Users will not be able to access sites host with you at all.
If you don’t pay in next 24 hours, attack will start, your service going down permanently. Price to stop will increase to 1 BTC and will go up 1 BTC for every day of attack.”
It is clear that the scammers were knowledgeable enough to access Whois data and find out the email addresses of domain name registrants in .US. However, the threat of a DDoS attack and an attempt to pretend to be the Anonymous hackers group is an obvious bluff, at least for the reason that the scammers did not have the skills to check whether the websites exist. In fact, many recipients of the email threats only own parked domains, without websites. Threatening them with a DDoS attack is therefore quite ridiculous.
