41–50 of 94 posts
FBI, Cyber Command, Secret Service, Russian run Group-IB, DoD and spokesperson for the White House National Security Council seen in the background doing high fives and congratulating themselves on "Mission Accomplished".
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That's like saying "make it illegal to get robbed". If I have a robber with a gun to my head asking for my wallet, I would comply. I wouldn't tell them sorry it is illegal to give you my wallet. You should not penalize the victim. Crack down on perps, not victims please.
No those are not similar cases. Yours is urgent, violent, tiny scale, and individual level. The individual doesn't have any agency in this situation. The alternative is get shot and robbed. If a corporation is unable to pay a ransom then the incentive to do the ransomware attack immediately drops. Cracking down on perps would be nice, but is not feasible.
The anti-yakuza strategy suggested here probably wouldn't fit as a solution for attacking ransomware.
I hope this is a sign of things to come. Train robberies and privateering were common because the culprits were rarely caught. I feel ransomware has been so successful because it operated in an environment where you never get caught. The solution is always the same, step up the enforcement.
When a lot of culprits are state actors, stepping up enforcement is a naive and useless endeavour
Any real, as in flesh and blood, person(s) arrested? Otherwise this is only a small delay.
Yes. Watch a stream from arrest: https://therecord.media/two-members-of-a-ransomware-gang-wer... They had the opportunity to search within unlocked computer and devices. Found money.
I would have expected a sweet homelab with lots nd lots of hardware to try the ransomware on, in a more "bachelor" environment.
I hope this is a sign of things to come. Train robberies and privateering were common because the culprits were rarely caught. I feel ransomware has been so successful because it operated in an environment where you never get caught. The solution is always the same, step up the enforcement.
When a lot of culprits are state actors, stepping up enforcement is a naive and useless endeavour
I hope this is a sign of things to come. Train robberies and privateering were common because the culprits were rarely caught. I feel ransomware has been so successful because it operated in an environment where you never get caught. The solution is always the same, step up the enforcement.
When a lot of culprits are state actors, stepping up enforcement is a naive and useless endeavour
I’m not saying it’s easy, just that this is the thing to do when you’re attacked.
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When a lot of culprits are state actors, stepping up enforcement is a naive and useless endeavour
I don’t think so. Hack the hackers. In a war if someone is shooting at you, you shoot back. Until you do, they keep shooting. I’m not saying it’s easy , just that this is the thing to do when you’re attacked.
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No those are not similar cases. Yours is urgent, violent, tiny scale, and individual level. The individual doesn't have any agency in this situation. The alternative is get shot and robbed. If a corporation is unable to pay a ransom then the incentive to do the ransomware attack immediately drops. Cracking down on perps would be nice, but is not feasible.
No. I can’t believe this needs to be explained, but the two situations are remarkably alike. If all of a corporations data is being held to ransom, there is no choice in the matter, they must pay. You’re talking like losing all their customers or IP or shutting down the corporation wouldn’t hurt anyone but it would hurt all their employees at the least. What such an idiotic, short sighted policy would do is to encour…
If paying in secret is a crime, with whistleblower opportunities, then paying in secret is not so easy. Forbidding payments will massively decrease the value of doing the attacks and reduce the number of them.
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Stepping up enforcement fails all the time. If you want ransomware to stop being effective, make it illegal to pay the ransom.
I would have loved to have seen what would have happened to the East Coast of the US if Colonial wasn't allowed to pay ransomware, or the various beef suppliers in the Americas if they weren't allowed to pay. Making it illegal to pay just isn't feasible for practical business purposes.
Probably similar for beef suppliers, although I didn't read any media about what systems were impacted there. Assuming some of the labelling or other food safety things were impacted, you would need an FDA waiver of some sort.
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Stepping up enforcement fails all the time. If you want ransomware to stop being effective, make it illegal to pay the ransom.
Make insecure software the problem of its producer, so that except for gross negligence by the user, the software vendor is on the hook (reimbursing customers) and will want to prevent ransomware from being a thing in the first place.
Not having tested, well scoped, and reasonably frequent backups for business critical corporate operations is gross negligence.