An article of he Mainichi Shimbun, on 14th June 2008, reported recent cyber attacks case: attacked company Web pages are shut down by huge amounts of traffic and the perpetrators send e-mails demanding.
Major information security company Little eArth Corporation Co. (LAC) says that since late April, it has been approached by three firms in the Tokyo metropolitan area about such attacks. The companies’ servers are reportedly being targeted in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, in which a vast numbers of requests are sent via a network of compromised computers (a botnet), eating up the available bandwidth and making their Web pages unavailable. Afterwards, an e-mail is sent demanding that money be deposited into a specific account in exchange for halting the attacks, with the initial amount around 500,000 yen. If it is ignored, another e-mail is sent a few days later, this time demanding a higher amount.
The article reports that these types of threats occur mainly overseas, but a Japanese company was confirmed for the first time to have fallen victim in May last year. Between then and March this year, there have been two or three other such incidents.
