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> has no idea what their doing You complained about bad grammar in your article, so I feel the need to point out this error in the last sentence.
Oh lawrd. I need to stop writing blog posts in vim. Thanks for the catch.
set spell spelllang=en_us
Just want to make this as clear as possible. Throwaway account, so I won't be replying or ever using this ever again, but let me run through a few things. * Whomever is running this auction knows everything that has been mentioned in these threads already, and they're probably a few steps ahead of us all. There are multiple indicators that they know what they're doing from a technical standpoint and that it's very li…
I will really be surprised if anyone actually bids any significant amount. Come on, an open-ended auction where they keep all bids? The overly-russian phrasing? Just screams legitimacy.
So if you buy organic food, people will grow more organic food. If you buy oil, people will pump more oil. If you buy ivory, people will kill elephants for their tusks.
If you put money into this, people will do more of it.
Wikipedia link for the lazy folks like me that didn't know the Equation Group: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group
> The malware used in their operations, dubbed EquationDrug and GrayFish, is found to be capable of reprogramming hard disk drive firmware. Wow. We really are f----d all the way down the stack.
If this is real and has anything that can link the files to the NSA, it has the potential to be a major humiliation for the US.
I suspect that's the real plan here. Use the auction to stir up attention and blackmail any state actors implicated by these files into hushing the whole thing. Hence the open ended termination.
Then imply a state actor won (via a large self-bid) or disrupted the auction. Hence the penny-auction structure, where they can walk away and keep preliminary bids.
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Not to mention the complete insults to anyone who would want to buy it. A government would handle this by trying to chase down the autioneers. If they wanted the data, they would buy it from Kaspersky, assuming it's real.
The auctioneers indicate that they have the "server side" code. Kaspersky would only have the "client side" code. ...The client gets infected with malware and sends the data home... to some server. The server side.
There's a lot of game theory that suggests it's not worth betting on this because any bet will have a rational higher one.
The structure of this auction is amazing! 1. All bids are paid up front, and you never get your money back, even if you aren't the highest bidder. So if people bid $50, $70, and $100, they collect $220. 2. No one can verify what is actualy up for sale before the auction. 3. There is no way for the world to know that they actualy delivered the goods after the auction. 4. There is no way for the highest bidder to know…
Alternatively, the whole auction is a ruse to confuse people before they drop the whole thing for free.