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What are the chances this is a $4.5m transfer to North Korea?
Low. The hackers are likely European, since there are telltales like European number formatting ("10.000.000$") and awkward phrases like "make a step forward" (perhaps Italian fare un passo avanti ?).
This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing.
We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity.
Instead democratizing currency, we're democratizing large scale crime. Previously only large organized crime organizations could perform such an attack. Now, almost anyone can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, how do you feel about people paying ransom for traditional kidnappings? Same logic, or is it different?
In general paying off kidnappers is also a bad policy. However I see a huge difference between protecting human lives versus protecting corporate assets.
The idea that there are fundamental differences between human lives and corporate assets is flawed. There's a very specific value of human life: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is where insurance can come into play. Like get a smoke alarm and sprinklers, but also get fire insurance.
An insurance would be a much better idea than what OP suggested.
Even though not paying the ransom is recommended, some companies are instead paying the ransom as part of their insurance coverage. For example, earlier this year Lake City, Florida was a victim of a ransomware attack. After receiving approval from their insurer. Lake City paid $460,000 in order to restore their systems. Since they had cyber insurance, the city only had to pay a $10,000 deductible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main idea here is that prohibiting payouts might make the crime less frequent. That’s somehow reasonable given the relative low stakes involved—from a moral perspective, data is usually of a lesser value than human lives. Therefore, yes, those cases are very different indeed. For once, kidnapping a human being is already punishable enough by itself so it makes no sense to punish a payout that could actually save…
The only reason the kidnappings happen is because the payouts happen. If effective measures stopped any real possibility of payouts, the kidnappings would stop, too, saving a lot more lives.
Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing. We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity…
I still don’t understand - how is Bitcoin difficult to trace when there is a global immutable public record of all transactions?
For some context about CWT (I was curious about these figures) -- via Wikipedia[1]: * US$1.5 billion in revenue * 18k employees For a firm like this, the payment probably amounts to a small uptick in a small portion of their IT budget and won't even come close to hurting them (and, frankly, neither would the $10m figure). It's insane that this is the case and that companies are willing & able to pay ransoms like this…
Is the ransom tax deductible?
While these stories are becoming all too common I’d like to think that while we’re in a golden age of being a ransomware payouts, it will lead to actually caring about security by many of the high-profile affected companies. While the overall cost may be low for them, if they don’t make meaningful changes to prevent these issues in the future, it’s not hard to imagine it might add up quickly. I don’t support these at…
Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing. We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity…
Malta enables Binance to enable users to "clean" approximately ~2 bitcoins/day per an account.
Binance has ~5 times the daily trading volume of the 2nd leading exchange.