Bitcoin Extortion Group DD4BC Prompts Warning from Swiss Government

May 8, 2015 at 20:30 UTCUpdated May 8, 2015 at 22:16 UTC. Extortionist group DD4BC appears to be connected to a new wave of distributed denial of service attacks against organizations in Switzerland, New Zealand and Australia.

With the new attacks, the group is seeking 25 BTC from affected parties in exchange for relinquishing the flood of inbound data is issues that renders recipient websites inaccessible.

Most recently, DD4BC was named in an 8th May warning published by the Swiss Governmental Computer Emergency Response Team, a division of MELANI, a national agency focused on cybersecurity issues.

According to the New Zealand government, the extortion attempts appear to begin with a short DDoS attack to demonstrate the potential impact after the ransom demand has been issued.

DD4BC has been tied to past attacks on digital currency businesses and websites, including extortion attempts against a number of well-known mining pool operators.

"While these attacks have targeted foreign organisations in the past months, we have seen an increase of activity of DD4BC in Europe recently. Since earlier this week, the DD4BC Team expanded their operation to Switzerland."

News of the New Zealand attacks surfaced earlier this week, when the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre released a warning about DDoS attacks on local organizations.

National security advisor for the New Zealand government Daria Brankin declined to comment when reached.

Cybersecurity nonprofit New Zealand Internet Task Force chairman Barry Brailey confirmed the connection between the group and the recent DDoS attacks in that country.

A string of incidents involving DD4BC last year culminated with the creation of a 100 BTC bounty after the group targeted bitcoin exchange and wallet service Bitalo.