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Cybercrooks launch DDoS assault on anti-fraud site

Backhanded compliment

Updated Unidentified miscreants have launched a denial of service attack on a UK-based anti-fraud website.

Bobbear.co.uk, which fights money laundering by warning about groups attempting to recruit mules, was left unreachable on Monday after coming under a distributed denial of service attack. Net security firm Sophos reports that the site was taken out by an assault from a botnet of compromised PCs that began late on Sunday. The timing of the assault coincides with the launch of Get Safe Online week in the UK.

It's pretty clear that Russian criminals are behind the attack and it is still continuing, site admin Bob Harrison told El Reg. "Undoubtedly it is simply a response to the work I do in highlighting the mainly Russian money laundering and reshipping frauds that are currently plaguing the internet and wrecking the lives of innumerable victims."

Harrison has reported the attack to the Met's computer crime unit and to Russian domains linked to the assault, more details of which can be found here.

It's not the first time the site has come under fire from cybercrooks. In October 2007 a spam campaign sought to discredit Bobbear by bombarding all and sundry with supposed begging requests. In reality the "Joe Job" junk mail messages, asking for donations through online payment service e-Gold, were nothing to do with site administrator Bob Harrison or Bobbear.co.uk.

UK hosts Fasthosts unwittingly aided fraudsters by temporarily suspending the Bobbear.co.uk domain in response to complaints about the fraudulent emails. This time around Fasthosts have gone out of their way to help Bobbear, Harrison reports.

"Fashosts probably couldn't have done more in the circumstances. If I tell you that the Fasthosts server logs of these events amount to over 20Gb of data, you'll probably see the scale of the attack. They could have pulled the plug, but they have persevered in trying to minimise the attack," Harrison explained. ®

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