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U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

reuters.com

181–190 of 591 posts

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#181
post #160

So let's look at the chain of events: companies start to become monopolies, make billions of dollars that way. They become "too big too fail", important "infrastructure" for the US. Then, start to expose their user's data on public networks, and don't follow proper security procedures. Now, the public has to pay for the government to secure the magacorp networks! It's a non-stop scam, where they fail their (already s…

I too dislike megacorps, but you could say the same thing about a business being robbed - they most likely could have done something to prevent it but police will still respond and not charge them for it.

Well it's one thing getting robbed when you took precautions like securing your back entrances, putting security cameras in your store, putting the cash in some kind of safe and it's a different if you take no precautions whatsoever and everything is out in the open.

Many of these companies that get hacked haven't even done the bare minimum, so it's not even remotely comparable to a robbery imo.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#182
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, does Bitcoin give people the sort of high that they'd risk going to prison for? I'm not sure nearly-random numbers has the staying power compared to addictive substances.

Bitcoin is just math. The US isn't going to be able make holding bitcoin illegal, and I very much doubt it will ever be able to make the buying and selling of it illegal -- there are even free speech issues here. But what it can do is tax the hell out of it, regulate the exchanges as investment platforms, but they will have a hard time trying to make it illegal to pay someone to sign a cryptographic hash.

The US very much decides who, where, and what can be bought or sold in USD. Worldwide.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have plenty of historical and current examples of governments imposing capital controls to restrict access to foreign currency. Very rarely does it result in the market price of the foreign currency going down. Usually quite the opposite. That's a nonsense comparison. When governments impose capital controls it means their currency is already sinking and it's a last ditch attempt to prevent this inevitable scena…

The US only constitutes 15% of global GDP. There's no reason to think that US investors represent an outsized position in crypto holdings. American funds may have large positions, but that's largely because the American asset managers tend to attract substantial overseas positions. There's no reason to think that, say a Japanese pension fund, that's invested in Grayscale is going to say, "oh shoot, guess there's no p…

> The US only constitutes 15% of global GDP. There's no reason to think that US investors represent an outsized position in crypto holdings.

Holdings would seem to be more reasonably assumed to be proportional to wealth [0], not GDP. The US has a significantly larger share of global wealth than it does of GDP.

[0] or maybe more-than-linearly related, since less-wealthy people will have more of their wealth in directly-used assets like tools, vehicles, and homes.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#184

If I wanted to make encryption illegal, and I ran a 3 letter agency, how could I get my population to support me?

If encryption was illegal, all these corporate secrets would be even more out in the open, not sure how that's better.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#185

Let's look at the chain of events. Computing machinery becomes exponentially cheaper, and it gets pushed into all corners of industry. Shared computing becomes a thing, and the need to have a better model of security is realized as a lesson from Viet Nam, and the Capability Based Security model is born. Microprocessors again exponentially decrease the cost of computing, and Capability Based Security isn't required be…

The irony of this post on a VC hosted forum. If you believe this, couldn’t/shouldn’t you pitch it get funding and live the Silicon Valley dream and “make the world a better place”?

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that analogy doesn’t hold. These cyber attacks are all but literally one bored kid and a computer. If the Russians sent one bored kid over here to blow up Hoover Dam, and that actually worked, we’d blame the people who put up the dam. The fact is that the correct and secure working of computer systems and networks has been severely neglected by companies in favor of their profit. If we are to have state respo…

> These cyber attacks are all but literally one bored kid and a computer. Are you sure about that? A lot of this stuff is way more than just some bored kid. For the company I work for, there is almost certainly a group of well paid people who sit around every day trying to figure out new ways run scams using our site. When there is financial motivation, people go through great efforts to get that $$$. "Security" isn'…

Right, security is definitely not a box you can check but American business have decided that if they run Qualys to get that PCI-DSS everything is good. Nobody is out there seriously talking about the fact that the Linux kernel is written in fucking C. Well it's 2% faster than if we wrote it in an actual language with, I don't know, bounds checking, and we'd rather use the 2% for dividends, thanks very much. We need some economic and regulatory incentives here so the public endpoints of your critical oil pipeline are running applications written in safer languages on seL4 platforms with hardware roots of trust, instead of god-damned DOS.

The software industry should be ten times bigger than it is, but the economic incentive has been to make it cost less, rather than to make it safer.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have plenty of historical and current examples of governments imposing capital controls to restrict access to foreign currency. Very rarely does it result in the market price of the foreign currency going down. Usually quite the opposite. That's a nonsense comparison. When governments impose capital controls it means their currency is already sinking and it's a last ditch attempt to prevent this inevitable scena…

The US only constitutes 15% of global GDP. There's no reason to think that US investors represent an outsized position in crypto holdings. American funds may have large positions, but that's largely because the American asset managers tend to attract substantial overseas positions. There's no reason to think that, say a Japanese pension fund, that's invested in Grayscale is going to say, "oh shoot, guess there's no p…

You bitcoin guys are hilarious with your narratives. "If it crashes it's just going to be an opportunity for the rest to get in"...

Bitcoin market swings on Elon Musks tweets, a full scale ban in the US would obliterate it.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#188
I'm surprised at how dismissive the comments are. We need many angles of defense against these criminals. Dismissing this because companies should do better security is like dismissing doctors because people should get more exercise. That's silly. We need preventative care and treatment.

I'm not surprised by this announcement because the way that the pipeline-company ransomware hackers beat a hasty retreat was noticeably unusual, and already seemed to telegraph that the state was getting involved more...actively. Good.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#189
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is just math. The US isn't going to be able make holding bitcoin illegal, and I very much doubt it will ever be able to make the buying and selling of it illegal -- there are even free speech issues here. But what it can do is tax the hell out of it, regulate the exchanges as investment platforms, but they will have a hard time trying to make it illegal to pay someone to sign a cryptographic hash.

The US very much decides who, where, and what can be bought or sold in USD. Worldwide.

So if I give 10$ cash to buy something, the US government is right above my right shoulder approving that transaction? You realize that doesn't make any sense right.

Re: U.S. to give ransomware hacks similar priority as terrorism, official says

#190
post #25

What about the other side of this? Instead of seeking backdoors and using them to spy on Americans, the NSA should be stepping up their game and securing vital infrastructure and domestic businesses against these attacks.

What exactly do you expect the NSA to do? This is entirely preventable. Something as simple as an offsite tape backup completely thwarts the attack.

Do you want the NSA to send agents out to every Fortune 500 with a blank check so taxpayers can pay for a sane backup strategy to stop a problem we solved 30 years ago?

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