Update Nov 1, 2018, 9.30am: The DDOS attack continued through last night. We finally moved our servers into a high-secure environment. In total, we received more than 2 billion bad requests from thousands of IP addresses and dozens of servers worldwide over the 7 days of the attack. A more detailed report on the DDOS attack and its background will be published soon.
Update Oct 26, 2018, 3.30pm: the DDOS campaign continued with more than 125 million identified bad requests (threats) over the last 24 hours. In total, our server had to deal with more than 500 million requests in the last 24 hours. We have been working continuously to block those bad IP’s and establish our defense line. Again, we apologize for the experienced downtime and any inconvenience.
Update Oct 26, 2018, 12.30am: FinTelegram currently experiences another massive DDOS attack which started several hours after the first one. Hence, our websites may still be down temporarily. More than 25 Mio bad requests have been sent to our servers from IP addresses in Brazil, China, Turkey, and other countries within the last 24 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience and keep on tracking those perpetrators down in the very best interest of investors.
The Global Attack on FinTelegram
The DDOS attack was not really unexpected. That is what you can expect when reporting on cybercriminals. Whoever reports about spammers, scammers and fraudsters on the Internet like FinTelegram automatically become the target of such attacks. All the more if you report about people like Gery SHALON, Gal BARAK and their partner Vladislav SMIRNOV (formerly Vladislav KHOKHOLKOV), a kingpin in the world of SPAMMERS and alleged co-conspirator in the JP Morgan hack.
In the charge brought by the U.S. authorities against Gery SHALON, one can read that SHALON orchestrated such DDOS attacks against competitors in order to close their online business at least temporarily. Those competitors were illegal casino and gambling sites. According to the prosecution, SHALON conducted such attacks in order to make its competitors more compliant for shareholdings and other wishes.
The good news here for FinTelegram is that our business is not dependent on online availability only. FinTelegram investigates potential scams and fraud projects, consults investors, lawyers, and authorities and publish parts of its researches on its websites. Both research and consulting are fortunately independent of the availability of FinTelegram’s websites and hence DDOS attacks do not really interfere with our mission to protect investors. A DDOS attack is admittedly annoying, unpleasant for our readers, and causes significant financial damage for us and our partners but is not a lethal event.
Moreover, FinTelegram’s articles are published in parallel on media and are therefore independent of the availability of FinTelegram websites.
Together with our hosting partner 1&1, we analyzed tonights DDOS attack and filed a criminal complaint against the obvious perpetrators. DDOS attacks are classified as cybercrime in all jurisdictions and represent a serious crime. That is why we have worked together with experts from SPAM and DDOS to prepare for the next potential attack.
A final word regarding the fairness of our reports: we have been asking Gal BARAK, Gery SHALON, and their party many times to provide answers for the many questions. So far, they remained silent for the most part of our questions. Yes, we have been in contact with them. Yes, we have received faked screenshots and answers that do not correspond with official records. No, we are definitely not unfair to those guys. On the contrary, they keep on playing their criminal games hiding behind bribery of officials and the alleged protection of U.S. authorities.
