Cyber Shakedowns On Rise

Latest Approach For Online Thieves One Of Oldest In Book: Extortion

(CBS)  For any company doing business on the Internet, it's the sound of doom: a computer voice warning of an inbound attack.

Call it a cyber-shakedown: A hacker threatens to shut down a company's Web page, unless the business pays up.

A Wall Street company's security manager, who asked CBS News to protect his identity because he fears another attack, got a hold up note asking for a few thousand dollars.

"We knew it was real when I got a phone call in the middle of the night saying, 'Oh, by the way, all the Web sites are down," he says. "All I could think about was 100 years ago in neighborhoods around New York City, guys showing up saying, 'Pay or the meat doesn't get delivered.'

"This is the same thing only now the people don't actually exist anywhere."

"They're actually all over," says Barrett Lyon, who runs a company that fends off these attacks. "We've seen attackers in Turkey, Kazakhstan, China, Korea, everywhere."

Lyons sees it as an organized crime syndicate.

As CBS News Correspondent Jim Axelrod reports, it's not a group of guys with brass knuckles, but it is a mob. Because what cyber extortionists do is infect computers sitting innocently in a home or office with spyware and without the computers' owners ever knowing that their machines are part of a shakedown gang.

It's kind of like little soldiers in an army, a "zombie army," says Lyon.