An interesting story brewing about the FBI investigating a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on websites selling batteries. But the reporting does not go far enough: In fact, a little research reveals this is part of a much bigger assault on a range of industries.
As a starting point, look at Elinor Mills of the excellent Insecurity Complex at CNET:
U.S. battery firms reportedly targeted in online attack | InSecurity Complex – CNET News: “The FBI is investigating denial-of-service attacks targeting several U.S. battery retail Web sites last year that were traced to computers at Russian domains in what looks like a corporate-sabotage campaign, according to documents published yesterday by The Smoking Gun.”
But a closer look at the source documents suggests this is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. The Smoking Gun incorrectly reports the email address used by the alleged hacker, a St Petersburg man called Korjov Sergey Mihalivich, as lvf56fre@yahoo.com. In fact, the FBI lists it as lvf56kre@yahoo.com, which yields much more interesting results. Such as this one, from ShadowServer.
ShadowServer shows that the domains under that person’s control, globdomain.ru (not globdomian.ru as reported by the Smoking Gun) and greenter.ru, have been prolific since 2010 in launching DDOS attacks against 14 countries and more than 30 industries and government websites. An update from ShadowServer in January 2011 counted 170 “different victims. Again, these attacks are across many different industries and target some rather high profile sites.” (It doesn’t identify them.)
The DDOS attacks use the BlackEnergy botnet, described by Arbor Networks’ Jose Nazario in a 2007 paper [PDF]. Back then Nazario reported the botnet’s C&C systems were hosted in Malaysia and Russia.
The same email address used for those two domains has registered other domains: trashdomain.ru, which has been recorded as the host for a Trojan dropper called Microjoin.
In other words, this is a lot more than about batteries. This appears to be a DDOS for rent to businesses wanting to take out business rivals in a host of fields. Indeed, the FBI investigation makes this clear, and cites the $600,000 damage caused as included attacks on “a wide range of businesses located in the United States.” (This does not include the dozen other countries affected, hence, presumably, the quite low sum involved.)
The batteries attack took place in October 2010, but the FBI document makes clear that as of May 2011 the attacks were still going on.
At present it’s not clear who is behind these attacks–in other words, who is paying for them. This could be a ransom attack–pay up or we will keep DDOSing–but this doesn’t seem to be the case, as Batteries4less.com Chief Executive Coryon Redd doesn’t mention any such approach in an interview with Mills. He seems to believe that “[t]he competitor is going to be U.S.-based and contracting out with a bad guy in Russia.”
Could be right. In which case the investigation has stumbled on a dark world of business tactics stretching from banking to astrology consultants. More research needed, please.