DarkSide ransomware gang quits after servers, Bitcoin stash seized

Post by Kranar » Fri, May 14, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

danlugo92 wrote: post #88

kossTKR wrote: post #15

Can crypto actually be non-traceable? I remember currencies like Monero or ZCash advertising privacy from the last crypto craze. I mean if you have 100M in some account, can you actually run it trough "private" currencies to remove traces? BTC, ETH etc. all seems super traceable, even more so than in regular banking. Also how are criminals getting their money out with no one noticing, does Panama/Malta etc. have Krak…

One (of many) ways: Monero -> bitcoin -> localbitcoins with stolen identity. Each localbitcoins account can trade up to $200k a year without any kind of in-person verification. Also a lot of exchanges let you cash out via western union so... you could theorically send yourself say 10k or 20k a a month with that, there's no need to just withdraw it all at once.

Post by myth_buster » Fri, May 14, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #69

bredren wrote: post #45

It was a mistake to attack the business side of the oil company, because it created what could be sold as reasonable doubt to shut down the pipeline. As a result, the ransom had the optics of an attack on infrastructure. As evidenced by the coverage of Americans desperately filling up containers. This created the impetus for the US to treat this as an incident far and above the ambient ransomware activities leading u…

I think the question is, how come an attack on a hospital does not have the optics of an attack on infrastructure? (It almost seems oil does not require infrastructure - you can, theoretically, prep for an oil infrastructure outage by storing it containers, same as you do with water and food. But you can't really prep for a medical infrastructure outage. Is it just that, as a result, there were no photos of people ho…

Post by 3GuardLineups » Fri, May 14, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

ggggtez wrote: post #70

jtchang wrote: post #19

Just like the mob there are some targets that just aren't worth it because they bring too much heat. They are learning this is bad for business all around so they are stepping back and encouraging others to do the same.

This is it. Governments have cyber abilities that far outstrip individual organizations. And when cyber fails, there are still other diplomatic and less diplomatic tools. I wouldn't be surprised if the US Government here reached out to foreign governments for assistance in dismantling their infrastructure (it almost certainly was not on US soil). An individual hospital probably couldn't garner that kind of backing, b…

Post by intotheabyss » Fri, May 14, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #103

kossTKR wrote: post #15

Can crypto actually be non-traceable? I remember currencies like Monero or ZCash advertising privacy from the last crypto craze. I mean if you have 100M in some account, can you actually run it trough "private" currencies to remove traces? BTC, ETH etc. all seems super traceable, even more so than in regular banking. Also how are criminals getting their money out with no one noticing, does Panama/Malta etc. have Krak…

Yes, up to a limit. It's super trivial to withdraw, say, 1M. You can use https://tornado.cash/ to mix 100 ETH, there's currently around 10k such deposits, so you could do that 2-3 times to move 1M in ETH to an address that can't be tied to your previous addresses. It's possible but no longer trivial to withdraw 10M. You could use the above method over a period of time, and some other methods. It becomes much more dif…

Post by Verdex » Fri, May 14, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

ggggtez wrote: post #80

I think this roughly answers a question that I've been wondering about: Why don't cyber criminals hack into the energy grid, water, or other utilities? Surely their cyber security is outdated right? Well, their cyber security may not be the most advanced, but traditional security (i.e. military strength) likely dissuades criminals from choosing those targets that are likely to put them on the short list.