181–190 of 216 posts
Ransomware got way more viable thanks to crypto. No more need for money mules and shady shell companies, just take moneys in crypto and you’re golden
Ransomware got way more viable thanks to crypto. No more need for money mules and shady shell companies, just take moneys in crypto and you’re golden
That crypto has to become real money at some point. If the ransom is in something like bitcoin (very common) then identification is just a waiting game for that conversion
Not really. Those things either fund themselves or their divisions get shut down within the criminal organization. Paid ransoms mostly fund luxury sports cars and vacation homes.
Source: I'm a Russian mob boss and ransomware is highly segmented from the rest of my rackets.
The difficulty with ransomware attacks and the like, is that it's less a technical problem and more a people problem. IT departments will never have enough money/time/staff to keep systems up to date with the latest OS (look at the number of people still running critical systems on Windows XP). Users will always open attachments from people they don't know, click links, or even pick up random USB sticks. The perpetra…
>The difficulty with ransomware attacks and the like, is that it's less a technical problem and more a people problem. The cause is definitely technical , it is a huge gaping hole in the design of modern operating systems that you could sail the Ever Given through sideways without incident. Your operating system does not confer to the user the ability to delegate only X resources to the opening of a file, email, etc.…
Wondering how we're going to remember the times before proper capability based security systems go mainstream...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A second root problem is the insanity of public SMTP on today's Internet: allowing anyone, claiming any identity, to send you any content without limits. I started the "mnm" open source project to enable a new email network, on a new protocol. More: https://mnmnotmail.org/ Follow: https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail
This problem is partially solved by DMARC/SPF/DKIM. There a few issues with DMARC, but the main one - adoption by senders is well below 100% so you just cannot block mail without DMARC. But the main question I have - does a typical mail users actually care about sender domain? I suspect - not at all. And I see two main reasons for this. First notion of domain is de-emphasized everywhere - browsers turned address bar…
I wonder if this could be fixed by email clients marking emails that fail DKIM as spam/attaching a large warning. Most users use email clients and they really don't do a great job of notify users of potential spoofing issues (with Gmail, you have to find "view original" to see that DKIM fails). I'm sure that spam filters would notice after a few hundred/thousand emails, but a successful spear-phishing attempt may not require that many emails. If customers complain about legitimate emails being marked as actually fraudulent, I'm sure adoption rates will increase.
Backups. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of backups. Take backups, verify your ability to restore from them, and keep them segregated from the rest of your infrastructure. It doesn't matter how inelegant and hacky your backup solution is, so long as you can restore from it. Any backup you can restore from is better than no backup. You might get a call from one of your application engineers shortly before bed…
Source: I’m a cybersecurity lawyer.
Exchanges are good at blacklisting BTC ,so this means it will be hard for hackers to cash out. Just converting BTC into XMR is not a trivial process, as it needs to go through an exchange. Trustless cross chain transactions are still in infancy .
Send via an accountless coin swap. The trust problem is trivial to work around with a script to slice the loot into small lots (send 1/X, if goes through, send another 1/X, if not, move to another swap bot). Will take a little while, but you can read some Lambo reviews while you wait.
Yeah but the BTC fee problem isn't trivial. When each "small lot" costs $20 to transfer, your Lambo very quickly turns into a Hyundai
Earlier quoted context omitted.
most recently the twitter hacker was arrested after failing to use a btc mixer https://ciphertrace.com/twitter-hack-update-blockchain-analy... https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334421/twitter-hacker-b...
Less to do with bitcoin and more to do with random data you would not expect to identify you. "(KYC) data associated with the accounts—such as ID, birthday and address—revealing their true identities" Once the coins entered the mixing services they were gone. It looks like they got the info from the Texas exchange.
I don't think the TX in that article means an exchange based in Texas. I think TX is abbreviating the word "transaction". Every instance of TX is followed directly by a bitcoin transaction id.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting an entire society under ubiquitous surveillance to catch a tiny minority of criminals isn't a good bargain. Fact is, though, that's not even why they do it. Eventually you get to the point where you see that the information and ultimate large scale control permitted by the collection of that information is itself the end goal, and that it has nothing to do with detecting or preventing crime.
It's easier to trace Bitcoin than cash.
Backups. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of backups. Take backups, verify your ability to restore from them, and keep them segregated from the rest of your infrastructure. It doesn't matter how inelegant and hacky your backup solution is, so long as you can restore from it. Any backup you can restore from is better than no backup. You might get a call from one of your application engineers shortly before bed…
I sometimes do infrastructure consulting. One of the first questions I ask is if they have at least one fully independent, full/incremental off-site backup that can't be corrupted from the main infrastructure, and if they have ever checked if they actually work and are restorable. I'm continuously surprised how often the answer turns out to be no after dinner digging, even in larger companies with otherwise well-run…
I have been heads down on my own side hustle as a one man show. Do you have any suggestions on how to properly approach backups for smaller groups like myself working with limited funds?
For context, some of the tech on my plate includes a few DO ubuntu droplets (hosting docker containerized services), Postgres DB (prod DO managed w/ auto-snaps, pretty much same scenario you mentioned), S3 storage for user-created assets (DO spaces w/ no backup strategy yet; no, not launched, yet), GitHub for source code, and physical MacBooks (iCloud + manual backups to a single physical external SSD).
Realistically speaking I’m bootstrapped. More importantly, I’m interested in learning the right ways in doing backups.