New York Times:

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.

Among the businesses targeted in the initial wave of attacks were Vimeo, the video-sharing company; Meetup, a company that connects groups offline; Basecamp, a project management software company; Bit.ly, the link-shortening service; Shutterstock, the stock photography agency, and MailChimp, the email marketing provider. In nearly every case, the amount demanded was typically low, in the $300 range. And in some cases, one security consultant said, the victims paid the ransom.

Startups are becoming the go-to targets in this wave:

Tech start-ups are a ripe target because they often lack the sophisticated security architecture of a larger company, and because they depend on around-the-clock Internet access for their livelihood. That is the reason some say an alarming number of start-ups have paid the ransom, in hopes it would just go away.

If you are in the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) fighting business, business is flourishing. Problem is, there does not yet appear to be a reliable counteragent to a tenacious DDoS attack.

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. Moz has since signed up with services like CloudFlare, a company that helps mitigate DDoS attacks by spreading traffic among systems around the world, but Mr. Skinner said the attacker has found new ways to attack their systems.