Our good friends at the volunteer-led security community CastleCops are devoted to helping victims of cybercrime, but the community itself is also a frequent target for attacks from cybercrime organizations.

The attacks have, up until now, consisted mainly of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks intended to make the community unavailable for its members.

CastleCops has gradually improved its ability to withstand these attacks, keeping the community online, which has brought on a shift in tactics from the attackers. With the apparent intent to smear the good name of CastleCops, the bad guys have used hijacked Paypal accounts and phony eChecks to make donations to CastleCops, effectively implicating them as perpetrators of the crime.

Read more about it at the CastleCops site and the Washington Post blog entry "The Threat of Reputation-Based Attacks".