The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has published a few more details on the criminals threatening startups with DDoS attacks:

For several months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been investigating a wave of so-called denial-of-service, or DDoS attacks, against web start-ups. In each case, attackers knock their victims offline using a flood of traffic and refuse to stop until victims pay their ransom in Bitcoins.

It’s interesting to note that their demands are relatively cheap, by even startup standards:

At Moz, Anthony Skinner, the company’s chief technology officer, said in an interview that initially the hacker — or a group of hackers who use the same email address — asked for $200 to stop attacks on their system. When the company refused to pay, Mr. Skinner said, the ransom demand increased to $2,000.

And as the demand scales up, so do the attacks…

(We covered their attacks on Feedly earlier in the week)

Photo by Davide Restivo, and used under a Creative Commons licence