To an old-time bookie like Mickey Richardson, $500 in protection money was chump change.
So when he got an e-mail from gangsters threatening to bring his online sports betting operation to its knees, he paid up.
Before long, though, the thugs wanted $40,000. And that ticked him off.
"I'm stubborn," said Richardson, who runs Costa Rica-based BetCRIS.com. "I wanted to be the guy that says, 'I didn't pay, and I beat them.'"
Richardson couldn't figure the odds, but he was determined to fight what's fast becoming the scourge of Internet-based businesses: high-tech protection rackets in which gangs of computer hackers choke off traffic to Web sites whose operators refuse their demands.
Rather than brass knuckles and baseball bats, the weapons of choice for these digital extortionists are thousands of computers. They use them to launch coordinated attacks that knock targeted Web sites off-line for days, or even weeks, at a time.
The shakedowns generate millions of dollars. Many Internet operators would rather pay protection money than risk even greater losses if their Web sites go down.
Instead of using a few machines, the extortion gangs control hundreds of thousands, often the personal computers of people with high-speed DSL lines or cable modems. Most of the PCs were compromised with a series of worms and viruses that began appearing last summer. They spread most easily to machines without firewalls and automated patching from security companies.
The infections force computers to listen for further instructions from a new program or direct them to check with master machines. The resulting armies of computer "bots" -- short for robots -- are used for sending spam and stealing financial information in addition to launching denial-of-service attacks.
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