A Turkish group of hackers has ‘gamified’ hacking in a bid to attract people by rewarding them with a point for attacking designated targets for every 10 minutes.
For every short-lived attack mounted by people on designated websites, the group rewards hackers with loyalty points, further encouraging them to hack. The points earned by people are logged on a scoreboard offered by a website named ‘Surface Defence’.
The reward points can be cashed-in by attackers to gain access to new hacking tools like Sledgehammer that can be used to launch DDoS attacks, and a ‘prank tool’ called ‘Kabus’ that can be used to scarce victims with sounds and images.
According to a report by security firm Forcepoint, a reward of one point is given for every 10 minutes of an attack directed at one of the targets. The report states that hacking crew all around Turkey came together to perform Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on a target list of organisations.
A live scoreboard noticed by Forcepoint showed that a hacker at the top of the board had scored over 450 points. These attacks are launched against those who oppose the Turkey government, including 24 political sites related to the Kurds, the German Christian Democratic Party (led by Angela Merkel), and more.
“Individuals gain points by participating in these DDoS attacks, which are then exchanged for software that enables them to perform online fraud,” said Forcepoint. However, the group has restricted the DDoS tool to run only on one machine, to ensure fairness during the competition.
The attack tools given to participants contain a backdoor that will secretly install a Trojan if a user is ‘banned’ from the competition, Forcepoint reported.
“It remains unknown whether the author of Sledgehammer and these various tools has a hidden agenda, or is simply experimenting with these concepts,” Forcepoint said.
