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Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

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Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#391

Post by hattmall »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #371
DevX101 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these ransoms are net good. I'd rather greedy hackers shake them down for money then having the country get crippled by political terrorists or enemy nation states that can't be negotiated or reasoned with. There are lots of infrastructure management teams taking security more seriously than they were a month ago. That alone is worth more than $5M

> These ransoms are net good...There are a lot of infrastructure teams taking security more seriously. Nonsense. This is not an academic exercise. Our country is being attacked by "nation states" (do more research) and we need to respond accordingly, treating it as the national security threat it is and making the perpetrators pay a heavy price. If they'd bombed our critical infrastructure, no one would be sitting ar…

Can they unbomb it for $5 million? Cause that would be cool.

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#392

Post by jackson1442 »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #376
an_opabinia wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know. Did any of it matter? It was bad when people started hoarding gas. Just a few unfathomably stupid people - as always in this country. If idiots didn’t hoard gas, nothing would really have gone wrong. The preppers are the other side of the same coin. The only thing they seem to never run out of is toilet paper. Who the fuck cares? Pentesters have the same energy. They tell you about what software not to…

You know what's way more effective at stopping gas hoarding so it's available for someone who really wants/needs it? Doubling the price per gallon. Anti-price gouging laws caused the shortage, just like with toilet paper and PPE last year.

A price increase that effectively stops people from hoarding gas would be equally as effective at stopping people who need gas from affording it.

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#393

Post by QuarterReptile »

In past times (not to my knowledge anymore), countries at war would provide letters of marque to private ship captains, authorizing them to attack enemy shipping and keep the proceeds. That is exactly what Russia has done.

What would it look like if the US, and for that matter a number of other frequently targeted countries, reciprocated?

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#394

Post by Veserv »

beachy wrote: post #333
Veserv wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely does affect backups. If you stand to gain $5M from an attack you can also target the backup systems and still easily end up profitable. Only if you stand to gain less than $100k does the budget actually start to get tight. As for how you attack the backup system it depends. If it push based you send your payload during the push. If it is pull based you craft your payload in the data that will be backed…

It seems appropriate to regurgitate the one about the bear and the hikers.... Two friends are in the woods, having a picnic. They spot a bear running at them. One friend gets up and starts running away from the bear. The other friend opens his backpack, takes out his running shoes, changes out of his hiking boots, and starts stretching. “Are you crazy?” the first friend shouts, looking over his shoulder as the bear c…

Except that is totally wrong. You are assuming that there is one bear, that you can escape the bear forever, that the bear is not hungry enough to eat everybody, and that the bears are not multiplying ferociously due to nearly unlimited supply of delicious food.

No, reality is more like the story of the dodo. A vast quantity of delicious prey that nobody was eating because nobody knew about them. Then they were discovered and some predators showed up but there were not enough to eat all of them. But then more and more predators showed up to exploit the vast untapped resource until they were all eaten.

We are still in the middle of that process which is borne out by the fact that the frequency of attacks has been increasing on the order of >100% per year and average demands per attack have been doing something similar. That is an utterly ferocious rate of growth that will soon be enough to attack not just the juiciest targets, but every profitable target in a few years.

Being slightly faster or slightly less delicious will not help when there are finally enough bears to eat everybody.

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#395

Post by HenryKissinger »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #393

In past times (not to my knowledge anymore), countries at war would provide letters of marque to private ship captains, authorizing them to attack enemy shipping and keep the proceeds. That is exactly what Russia has done. What would it look like if the US, and for that matter a number of other frequently targeted countries, reciprocated?

In the short term, an escalatory spiral. Each side would intensify its attacks until either:

(1) Someone crosses a red line, like cutting the electricity to New York City for days on end, prompting a proportionate response, or economic sanctions, or

(2) Diplomacy takes over and countries reach a quick agreement to curtail their activities, like during the Cuban missile crisis.

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#396

Post by QuarterReptile »

jackson1442 wrote: post #392
QuarterReptile wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's way more effective at stopping gas hoarding so it's available for someone who really wants/needs it? Doubling the price per gallon. Anti-price gouging laws caused the shortage, just like with toilet paper and PPE last year.

A price increase that effectively stops people from hoarding gas would be equally as effective at stopping people who need gas from affording it.

Addressing legitimate problems of hardship can be dealt with from the other end, by channeling resources to those people. In the mean time, higher prices mean that supply isn't interrupted, and for the vast majority of people that means that you don't fill up your car and your wife's car and your lawnmower and a 55gal drum, because it's not worth it. You just skip a few trips and let your gas tank get below half a tank. And if you were wrong about thinking you could hold out, you can still buy gas because it's not sitting in your neighbor's new gas cans in his garage.

We shouldn't have widespread shortages for the sake of theoretical people whose existences are structured around 5 gallon commutes and razor thin margins tied with no lines of credit to float a week of double gas expenses.

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#397

Post by unclebucknasty »

hattmall wrote: post #391
unclebucknasty wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These ransoms are net good...There are a lot of infrastructure teams taking security more seriously. Nonsense. This is not an academic exercise. Our country is being attacked by "nation states" (do more research) and we need to respond accordingly, treating it as the national security threat it is and making the perpetrators pay a heavy price. If they'd bombed our critical infrastructure, no one would be sitting ar…

Can they unbomb it for $5 million? Cause that would be cool.

>Can they unbomb it for $5 million? Cause that would be cool

Yes, we could "unbomb" it for some amount of money. But, we generally use the term "repair".

But, that's a great point: as long as we can undo the damage for some amount of money (via repair or paying extortion), we should let foreign adversaries dictate the terms on which they'll allow us to operate our infrastructure.

Still, do let us know when you think we should be concerned. 2 more pipelines? 3 more hospitals? 4 more police stations?

$5 trillion ransoms? Maybe? No? Perhaps when infrastructure outages and other attacks cause deaths?

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#398

Post by bumbledraven »

RyanHamilton wrote: post #372
bumbledraven wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which option maximizes the long-term rate of growth of your wealth depends on how much money you already have. The Kelly Criterion takes this into account and handles a wide range of situations including this one. Example: Say you have $10⁵, and you have the option to play game 1, which offers a 95% chance of a $5×10⁶ prize, or game 2, which offers a 50% chance of a $5×10⁷ prize. By the Kelly Criterion, the value of…

Great example. It is worth emphasising your model will capture the game from the ransom attackers perspective since for them it is repeated many times. It won't give the EV for the attacked as their number of ransom incidents will hopefully be very small rather than tend to infinity. Which likely means the EV will be based on their own personal utility function.

The Kelly Criterion can be used to analyze the options from the defender’s point of view, e.g.:

• pay for security that prevents attacks = lg[company value – cost of security]

• don’t pay for security = attack probability × lg[company value – cost of dealing with attack] + (1 – attack probability) × lg[company value]

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#399

Post by Guthur »

DevX101 wrote: post #259
kjrose wrote: post #201

The fact this was paid off, and paid off so rapidly means that targeting major infrastructure for massive payoffs is going to become more and more prominent. The next time though, it'll be $50M. I work with people in the oil fields and I know the numbers they are playing with and the fact that a single well being down can easily be $100,000 lost per hour. So obviously they want these systems back up fast. $5M for shu…

I think these ransoms are net good. I'd rather greedy hackers shake them down for money then having the country get crippled by political terrorists or enemy nation states that can't be negotiated or reasoned with. There are lots of infrastructure management teams taking security more seriously than they were a month ago. That alone is worth more than $5M

Of course political terrorists can be negotiated with, they have an agenda and stated goals. You might not like it but they're not actually mad they just use means you are not comfortable being brought to bear so close to home.

Re: Colonial Pipeline Paid Hackers Nearly $5M in Ransom

#400

Post by rcthompson »

bostonsre wrote: post #275
DevX101 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these ransoms are net good. I'd rather greedy hackers shake them down for money then having the country get crippled by political terrorists or enemy nation states that can't be negotiated or reasoned with. There are lots of infrastructure management teams taking security more seriously than they were a month ago. That alone is worth more than $5M

Yea, I think I tend to agree with you. It may cause a lot of pain in the short term, but being forced to pay penetration testers seems like it could be a net good in the long term for security in general. I don't think nation state attackers would be so kind as to un-fuck your system after they cripple it, even for a massive fee.

I might agree if I had any faith that the people who paid this ransom would do any more than the bare minimum to close this one specific vulnerability and nothing else.
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