Massive Cyber Attack on Vienna Sex Sites
According to our industry sources, several Vienna-related sex sites got attacked by hackers in the past few days. Many of these are the websites of well-known clubs and laufhauses. As a result of the DDoS attack, Laufhaus Vienna, Laufhaus Kontakt-Zentrum, Laufhaus Juchgasse, Laufhaus Zollgasse and Peepshow Burggasse became unavailable.
There are even sex magazines and portals that got affected by the attack. For example, Sexmagazin and Booksusi were both down, Booksusi was not available for 3-4 days. Sexmagazin is struggling to get back online again, as their website showed up shortly after the attack and then went off again.
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source. (Wikipedia)
We don’t know for sure what is happening in the moment but this indicates that these hacker attacks might still continue for a while.
Was This a Ransomware Attack?
It seems like the intention of these cybercriminals was to hack the sex sites for ransom. If this is true, we are definitely talking about a criminal case. There is not much evidence on this at the moment but we might get additional information about the situation later.
There were also big sites that weren’t affected by the attack. These include Maxim Wien, Babylon, Bijou Escort and other high-class escort agencies. The hackers behind the cyber-attacks clearly chose their targets for a reason while other sites are able to run without any issue.