Deleting Online Extortion

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 websites 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 websites 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 websites go down.

After more than a year perfecting their techniques on gambling and pornographic websites, the gangs are starting to turn their talents to mainstream e-commerce operations.

"It's pretty much a daily occurrence that one of our customers is under attack, and the sophistication of the attacks is getting better," said Ken Silva, a vice president at VeriSign Inc., the company that maintains the ".com" and ".net" domain name servers and provides security to many firms.

* Last month, Authorize.net, one of the biggest credit-card-services processors for online merchants, was hit repeatedly over two weeks, leaving thousands of businesses without a means to charge their customers.

* In April, hackers silenced Card Solutions International, a Kentucky company that sells credit card software over the Web, for a week after its owner refused to pay $10,000 to a group of Latvians. Only after switching Internet service providers could the company come back online.

* In August, a Massachusetts businessman was indicted on charges of orchestrating attacks on three television-services companies -- costing one more than $200,000. The case against Saad Echouafni is one of the rare instances in which alleged attackers have been identified and charged. Echouafni skipped bail.