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Funny that nightly tape backups, a very old and established technology, would pretty much fix the problem.
> These "customers," who have zero coding skills or software expertise, take advantage of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model to gain sophisticated capabilities > Incredibly, many of these operations look and function like authentic businesses. "They rent office space, they have development teams, data architecture teams, help desks, phone support, and people that negotiate ransoms with targets" What a crazy world…
Is this any different from the mafia in many places?
That is, ransomware as it exists today is only possible because secure, anonymous, non-reversible methods of payment exist in the form of cryptocurrency. Things like bearer bonds were outlawed decades ago because of a similar desire to make large anonymous, easily transportable payments impossible.
Honestly, if anything, I see ransomware as probably the primary use case today for crypto besides speculation.
> Gangs also have begun encrypting backup systems, including cloud storage services such as Office 365 and Drop-box. Although 56% of the firms surveyed by Sophos regained control of their data through backups, that window appears to be closing. "[Cybergangs] have realized that the ransom demand becomes powerless if you have a full backup set in place and you can revert to it," This is why our backups at work write to…
I want this on a simpler scale: an external drive that has a physical switch. In normal operation the switch is in "append only" mode and the drive ensures that nothing can be erased. Only when the switch is temporarily hit to a "unsafe" mode would it allow deleting to make more space. I don't know how easy or difficult this would be (I assume external drives don't typically know about filesystem-level information li…
> These "customers," who have zero coding skills or software expertise, take advantage of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model to gain sophisticated capabilities > Incredibly, many of these operations look and function like authentic businesses. "They rent office space, they have development teams, data architecture teams, help desks, phone support, and people that negotiate ransoms with targets" What a crazy world…
Is this any different from the mafia in many places?
Ransomware provides a useful service and should be legal. Businesses with poor security practices deserve to be punished for their negligence.
Kidnapping provides a useful service and should be legal. Schools, kindergardens and parents with poor security practices deserve to be punished for their negligence.
> These "customers," who have zero coding skills or software expertise, take advantage of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model to gain sophisticated capabilities > Incredibly, many of these operations look and function like authentic businesses. "They rent office space, they have development teams, data architecture teams, help desks, phone support, and people that negotiate ransoms with targets" What a crazy world…
A number of major drug cartels would be at least on the Fortune 1000 if they were publicly traded corporations. They have management structures, accountants, IT and security professionals, logistics, HR practices, and so on...
The type of billionaire individuals who by virtue of inheriting billions upon billions, don't ever have any real skills (nor the need to develop any) and yet, they live in societies (subcultures) which expect that they keep having (and making) billions upon billions.
Think of descendants of descendants of founders of what are now giant corporations.
They fund VC-backed startups, which they then own (by proxy). They can barely use an iPhone; let alone understand how it works or is made.
Except the business being funded is a criminal enterprise, maybe their riches originally come from "shadier" dealings?
My point is that the underlying principle is the same, it's a very powerful principle. This is how the market enables societies to build super complex stuff. The marketplace abstracts away the complexities. This 'principle' is a technology, it's ethically neutral.
> Not surprisingly, dozens of major ransomware gangs now exist worldwide, including in Russia, Eastern Europe, and North Korea. To what extent should ransomware activity be considered low-grade economic warfare by nation-states who can't or won't police cyber-criminals, and thus justification for robust national responses such as sanctions?
Ransomware only really works due to the lack of diversity of operating systems and software. If individuals and businesses were all running different stuff it would be nearly impossible to target them en mass. You could only target them one at a time.
While that is a solution, I don't think it is the solution. Another non-solution would be removing all Internet access. Ransomware problem solved, a whole bunch of other problems created.