Still sending them my junk-mines (couple usb sticks, a butterfly 30 and gpu) so pool is alive (20hrs active mining) but the webserver is still under attack so no clue if it's accounting for the work or not. Keeping my good miner on my other pool until I can get an update and see stats.
I know it's not their fault and applaud their decision not to pay the ransom so will be back full-speed with them when its resolved. I see they stepped up the ddos protection level today, and in time the putzes will move on if they aren't getting paid.
Its called a ransom malware virus the FBI Originally wrote it to so called "White-collar crime!" it encrypts your hard drive and all your files then you can not access them without undoing the encryption. The only way to do that I to get the key used to encrypt it which is stored on the FBI Server. Even If you remove the ransom ware virus your files or whole hard drive is encrypted and cant be undone only restore from a backup which it can store itself on there to and also encrypt it.
Now hackers use the same thing to scam money but they always ask for bitcoin because its not traceable at least that's what they think!
Just Google "Ransom ware virus" you will see a lot of info on it. It goes back in years!
And now there at it again with smarter methods that do the same thing!
Yikes.
Yes, such a ransom-ware attack certainly exists; however, that is not what is being utilized here. In this case, a user, or group of users, are flooding Bitmain's servers with traffic, effectively blocking out everyone else. That's the denial of service. The distributed part means it's coming from a whole host of IP addresses, making stopping it very difficult. Believe me, if it were just one guy on one machine, Bitmain or their upstream ISP could simply block traffic from that one address and the problem would be solved. These attacks typically come from many machines that the hacker controls, usually by means of a hidden trojan that the machine's owner is likely unaware is even on the box.
And no, the original ransom-ware attacks were most certainly not perpetrated by the FBI against white collar criminals. Geez, take off the tinfoil hat and spend a little time in the sun
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