The website http://MyMMOShop.com has been held ransom by a distributed denial-of-service attack. An email demanding a sum of money be sent to an individual in Somalia via Western Union was received.
Santa Monica, CA – April 7, 2009 — The website MyMMOShop.com has been under a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS attack) for the last 24 hours. A DDoS attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable.
MyMMOShop.com is an e-commerce store that sells virtual currency for popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft Gold, Final Fantasy XI Gil, Age of Conan Gold, Warhammer Online Gold, Lineage 2 Adena, Vanguard Saga of Heroes Gold and EverQuest 2 Platinum.
“No customer data or existing orders are being affected by this attack,” says Hunter Crowell, the media relations agent for MyMMOShop.com. Although no new orders can be taken since the website is essentially down. Numerous attempts by the websites hosting company have been unable to stop the attack so far.
Crowell believes that something has to be done quickly to try and bring some type of law and order to Somalia or things are only going to get much worse. The country has extreme poverty and when people are desperate they do extreme things. We see ships being hijacked on a weekly occurrence further and further off the coast, and now websites being hijacked, what will be next. The global recession will only make things worse for countries like Somalia.
Crowell stated that while the virtual currency business is doing well in the current economy, losing sales over an extended period of time will have a detrimental affect on MyMMOShop.com and if their hosting providers are not able to resolve the attack in the next few days, they will be force to pay the ransom and hope the attack stops.
Ask if law enforcement were any help in this matter, Crowell replied, “We were given the run around by the four agencies we contacted, it was very discouraging, but somewhat understandable when you look at where the attack is coming from.”
Crowell believes MyMMOShop.com was targeted because of the recent headlines about their $10 million deal, but unfortunately he does not think this is an isolated incident and expects to hear more stories about other sites under attack.
About MyMMOShop.com
MyMMOShop.com is involved in the real money trade (RMT) business and has been in business since 2003. It has locations throughout the United States, Ireland, and Australia.
Source:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/04/prweb2300734.htm
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