Police arrests a protection-fee charging hacker
CRI, November 6, 2015
Police in east China's Wuxi city have arrested a hacker who attacked the servers of an online gaming company and extorted a protection fee.
An illustration of a hacker attacking Internet. [Photo: sznews.com]
The hacker attacked the company's 20 servers leased from Aliyun between July 19 and 21 this year.
As a result of the server crash, the online games could not run normally, prompting hundreds of complaints from game users.
After the attack, the hacker contacted the company and admitted that he had hacked the company's servers. He then extorted a protection fee of 1880 yuan (around 296 US dollars) per month from the company, threatening it with repeated attacks if the company refused to pay up.
On August 12, the hacker attacked the company's servers again and this time asked the company to pay the protection fee for the next month in advance.
The company reported the case to the security authorities on July 22 this year.
