Brand.com’s Mike Zammuto Discusses Meetup.com Extortion
Wed, Mar 5th, 2014 | Posted In: Business | Written by: Harvey Greer
As President of Brand.com, Mike Zammuto witnessed the rise of an unsettling digital trend: anonymous users threatening to ruin the online reputations of business and executives by demanding high payment in cyber extortion schemes. Last December, he became the target of cyber extortion himself. Below, in light of the recent blackmail attempt against Meetup.com CEO Scott Heiferman, Zammuto comments on his own experiences and the evolving nature of cyber extortion.
The popular social media site Meetup.com just experienced this so-called dark side of the net when a cyber extortion plot put the site offline for the past several days.
According to reports, Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman received an email last Thursday with some unsettling demands. The anonymous email read “A competitor asked me to perform a DDoS attack on your website.” The extortionist asked for $300 to stop the attack, which Heiferman refused.
That Thursday, the DDoS attacks began, knocking the Meetup.com site down for most of the weekend and into Monday.
DDoS (Distributed denial of service) attacks are used to overwhelm a website with server requests. As a result, the site remains unable to complete any server requests and users lose access to it.
While it was a difficult choice for the company to not give into the demands and deal with the DDoS attacks, CEO Scott Heiferman said it’s a matter of policy and precedent. As a matter of policy, the company stated that it will not negotiate with criminals or entertain any extortion attempts against the site.
If the company were to relent and pay off the cyber-terrorist, it would also set a dangerous precedent. If one individual was paid off to prevent an attack, more would assuredly make similar demands.
The good news for Meetup is that as of Tuesday evening, the site was back up online with this news post about the outages:
“Meetup is generally stable. Everyone should have access at this time. We’re restoring all functionality and working through the email queue. It’ll take time – we appreciate your patience.”
Cyber attacks are no rare occurrence; these types of extortion attempts are actually becoming increasingly common across the Internet. Online brand management site Brand.com was itself a recent victim of cyber extortion.
According to Brand.com President Mike Zammuto, the attack occurred last December when unidentified extortionists demanded $500,000 worth of the crytpocurrency Bitcoin. If the company refused to pay the fees, the extortionists said that libelous content would be published to defame Zammuto and damage the public perception of the Brand.com company name.
The company refused to consent to the cyber extortion threats, and as expected, several posts against Zammuto were published on sites like RipoffReport.com. The posts leveled a myriad of false accusations against the Brand.com President, including references to an alleged Ponzi scheme that required employees to intentionally post negative information about prospective clients to coerce them into signing up for brand management services. Zammuto addressed the controversy directly in an article on Interpacket.com, where he explains the blackmail attempt in detail.
Despite these negative posts initially ranking on search engines under his name, Mike Zammuto worked with his team to address the defamatory content, essentially making the entire Brand.com company its own client. Company attorneys also worked with Google to immediately remove three of the libelous posts from search engine rankings.
For both Brand.com as well as Meetup.com, swift and decisive action in the midst of a crisis like cyber extortion is precisely what helped stop the situation from worsening.
As Zammuto said in an interview with Personal Branding Blog, “Professionals should understand that online attacks can come at any time, and as such, they also need to be prepared to take action against all-of-a-sudden attacks – that means firing out content on the spot and doing whatever it takes to push back negative listings. You need to be aggressive.”
Mike Zammuto and the rest of his Brand.com team work with companies in order to overcome defamatory or misrepresentative online content with the company’s monitoring and publishing services.