Comment by tim333
10 years ago
I was thinking in part of the pirate activities off Somalia. Most ship owners were better off paying $1m than losing a boat worth say $50m. The problem seems to have slacked off now and I feel it was more related to firearms being pointed in the direction of the pirates than people not paying. Likewise with Cryptolocker putting Evgeniy Bogachev in jail rather than on various yachts would be a start. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/03/fbi-bus...
This thread is not about pirate activities off Somalia, it is about paying a ransom under threat of DDOS. That's an entirely different thing and strategies that work in one case may or may not work in the other. Case in point: you can shoot at pirates.
To run an effective extortion racket you don't just have to convince your victims that they will be hurt if they don't pay - you also have to prove that they won't be hurt if they do pay.
There wouldn't be any point in paying a $1m ransom for a $50m boat if it was going to get caught by 49 other pirate groups on its way to safety. So when a ransom has been paid, pirates escort a boat to safety.
DDOSers can't offer any such guarantee; it's not like one DDOSer can stop another going after the same victim. And to my knowledge there aren't any websites where victims can post reviews saying whether the same DDOSer targeted them again later on.