Two men to face High Court trial over denial-of-service cyber-extortion threat

Arrested men appeared before Uxbridge Magistrates Court following 36-hour 2 August attack

Two men have appeared before Uxbridge Magistrates Court accused of attempted extortion connected to a distributed denial-of-service attack against a Manchester-based online gambling site.

They were charged with two offences of blackmail and one one offence of "unauthorised acts on computers" under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act.

Arrested on Wednesday last week, they were brought before Uxbridge Magistrates Court on Friday, when the case was forwarded to Crown Court for a full trial.

The men, Polish nationals Piotr Smirnaw of Warsaw, age 31 and Patryk Surmacki, 35, of Szczecin were arrested at Heathrow Airport. Authorities in the US and Poland were also involved in the investigation, alongside Greater Manchester Police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

It is alleged that the two men launched a 36-hour DoS attack against Club World Casino on 2 August 2013, preventing customers from using the website.

"Extortion attempts involving denial of service attacks certainly aren't a new phenomenon. In the past there have been numerous cases of websites that have found themselves the victims of attempted blackmail by criminal gangs who threaten to bring down their website," wrote security expert Graham Cluley in a blog posting.

He continued: "Often such blackmailers will demonstrate their ability to flood a website with traffic from a botnet of computers, proving their ability to prevent genuine customers from reaching the site, in an attempt to convince their victims into paying large amounts of money."