Cybercriminals claiming to be the Armada Collective have sent out extortion emails threatening independent and small businesses with DDoS attacks.

A group of cybercriminals which claim to be the infamous Armada Collective are threatening independent and small business websites worldwide with a huge Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, should they fail to pay the bitcoin ransoms requested by email.

It is still unclear if these cybercriminals are the real deal or are just pretending to be to scare possible victims into paying a ransom to prevent a DDoS attack that could threaten their businesses. The actual Armada Collective gained infamy last year after extorting money from a number of Swiss firms, several Thai banks and even ProtonMail which provides encrypted webmail.

The emails sent out to businesses around the globe inform users that their security is poor and that the group will launch a DDoS attack on their networks using the Cerber ransomware and anywhere from 10-300 Gigabytes per second (Gbps) of attack power.

However, anyone who received and email from the group can prevent the attack by paying one bitcoin which is equivalent to $606. If the ransom is not paid before they attack though, the price will go up significantly to 20 bitcoins to put an end to the DDoS attacks.

The group has also been kind enough to provide users who are unfamiliar with bitcoin all the information necessary on how to download a personal bitcoin wallet such as Multibit or Xapo. They are also informed on how to set up a bitcoin wallet of their choosing online.

It is quite possible that the group’s email demands could be fake and any user who received the email should contact their local authorities, but under no circumstance should they pay the ransom.

Source: http://www.itproportal.com/news/group-claiming-to-be-the-armada-collective-threatens-ddos-attacks/