SAS hackers ransom demand up again – now $10M

Anonymous Sudan, the pro-Russian hacker group that has been targeting SAS Airlines for more than a week, has increased its ransom demand again – this time to $10 million.

The hacktivist gang has been bullying Scandinavian Airlines with intermittent attacks, knocking the SAS website and app offline at various hours of the day, since May 24th.

What first started with a $3500 ransom demand, quickly escalated on May 25th to an ask of $175,000 to stop the hacking campaign.

A week later the demand skyrocketed to $3 million.

Now, Anonymous Sudan has raised the blackmail amount again, this time to the astronomical price-tag of $10 million.

At some point overnight, the group upped the ante to $7 million but then quickly increased the amount to an even $10 million – it seems for no reason other than to amuse themselves.

The reason for the nine-day long offensive? Anonymous Sudan claimed they were simply “bored.”

“We hope you will enjoy it when we attack you with all our power,“ the group posted on its Telegram channel as a warning to the airlines just before it all started.

“Just wait, now you will see if we're playing or not, we shall start attacking fiercely and without mercy at the time of posting this message,” the group said.

Throughout the nine-day attack, Anonymous Sudan has claimed they have no intention of stopping the attacks until the ever-increasing ransom is paid.

Instead, the group has continuously bashed the carrier for its lack of customer service.

The flagship carrier for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden still has not publicly commented on the attack, although that has certainly not been the case for SAS customers.

Dozens of SAS flyers have been complaining about the ordeal on Twitter since it began.

"@SAS any estimate on when your checkin services online will be back?," one customer tweeted Friday.

"Our team is working on solving the issue as soon as possible. At this moment we do not have any estimated time unfortunately," SAS tweeted back, suggesting the customer contact the airlines via a phone call.

"Hello @SAS, When I expect to be able to rebook my flight again? The website in Denmark has been down for some days," tweeted another.

SAS continued tweeting its most popular response to customer queries, "We currently have some technical difficulties on our website and IT support is working on solving this issue."

Anonymous Sudan had previously targeted Sweden and SAS in a Valentine's Day attack earlier this year, over a protester burning a Quran in Stockholm.

The Sudan-based group is known to also work with other pro-Russian threat groups, such as KillNet and UserSec, most recently in support of a coordinated hacking campaign against NATO.

All three groups are known to overwhelm their targets with DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, which overload a server with too many requests causing the website to crash.

Cybernews, which has been following the ongoing cyber saga since February, has reached out directly to SAS Airlines and is waiting for a response.