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GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

cloudsek.com

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Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#81

This thing was written by someone who doesn't live in a developed country... There's no way to do those actions in a developed country. Does this person think that just random children are available to be given food to?

People generally accept free stuff. Kids aren't some exception to this. You can accomplish this in any developed country with minor effort imo. Have any kids even distantly in your family? Kids know other kids so ask them to invite friends. "less fortunate" is a very broad descriptor for the children you need to feed, especially if you're fortunate.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#82

This is probably obvious to anyone but there isn't anything "good" about this, I expected this to be something along the lines of a crypto donation to GiveDirectly but this is just a sick wannabe Blackmirror power play.

It's the specifics that give it away. "Take 5 poor children from your neighborhood to Pizza Hut." Screaming kids at Pizza Hut aside, we can't make other people have empathy. They have to find it and explore it themselves, perhaps by seeing others do the same. It's especially ironic that someone with lowered empathy would be demanding someone else show fake empathy publicly before giving them back control of their own…

Can't make people have empathy, but you can make them carry out empathetic acts over and over again through blackmail with this ransomware.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#83
post #66

I've been predicting the rise of 'good clans' and 'good mafias' for some time. IMO, as governments become more corrupt, good people will be forced to join clans which adhere to their principles for survival. Power will shift towards clans, mafias and hacker groups.

very typically it is clans/mafia that corrupt the governments. such claims that mafia/clans are better than governments are very short-sighted and childish by nature.

What happened is that all the bad clans which produced no economic value have corrupted governments and are now using it to extract value from the good, value-creating citizens. Most of the bad people are already rich.

Good, value-creating citizens never had to consider joining a clan before because they were able to easily capture profits from their own labor without much extra effort on the value-capture/extraction side (they could focus purely on value creation)... But as this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, they will be forced to join their own clans to ensure that they can capture more of the proceeds of the value which they created. Since it cannot happen naturally as it did before, it needs to happen via explicit political means.

You can think of workers' unions as a kind of clan... This is happening everywhere in the economy now and IMO, it will only get worse as governments become more extractive and corrupt and as it becomes more profitable for people to spend their time and energy engaging in extractive activities rather than productive activities. The degree of corruption and aggression within clans will have to keep rising to match the corruption and aggression of governments.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean charities could open up crypto accounts; since it's a public ledger, the ransomware operators would be able to see the transaction.

There are charities who accept donations in crypto. We donated future royalties on secondary sales for some of the things we did at SXSW to Action against hunger for one example.

> We donated future royalties on secondary sales

So you donated nothing?

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#85

I assumed the "goodwill" would be a donation to an association that would be a front for the hackers to get the money somehow, but it seems that it's really acts of goodwill with no real money flowing, so maybe the hackers actually believe they're doing good ?

Wouldn't any legitimate charity return money that was donated through coercion? If someone stole something and gave it to me, and the rightful owner asked for it back, I would give it back. I guess it would just look bad asking for them to return it but most people would understand.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#86
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of treatments? How regularly? In the UK there is a department called NICE which uses health economics to understand how to best utilize the funding for the national health service to best improve health outcomes (generally measured by increasing QALY or Quality-Adjusted Life Years, but there are multiple measures in reality). This means that if there is a £500k treatment that could save the lives of a 70…

As an American, that's just disgusting. The government shouldn't decide if your parents die. The free market should decide. If you created enough shareholder value then you'll have enough to pay for their treatment like God intended.

I'm hoping this is sarcasm.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#87
post #85

I assumed the "goodwill" would be a donation to an association that would be a front for the hackers to get the money somehow, but it seems that it's really acts of goodwill with no real money flowing, so maybe the hackers actually believe they're doing good ?

Wouldn't any legitimate charity return money that was donated through coercion? If someone stole something and gave it to me, and the rightful owner asked for it back, I would give it back. I guess it would just look bad asking for them to return it but most people would understand.

I guess “it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message”.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#88

I can see a younger version of myself making something like this and intentionally letting it slip to the media for attention. I th8nk this line is telling: "Since there are no known victims/ targets for the ransomware group, their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures remain unknown." I don't think there's a risk if any great outbreak here. A bunch of scriptkiddies took some open source project and modified it with som…

Don't be dismissive of script kiddies, they can cause a lot of chaos, and often do it because they feel like no amount of self education or self improvement will improve their chances of stable full time employment. (Hence many of them operating out of the former USSR.)

I’ve met tons of script kiddies over the years and none of them were concerned about employment. They do what they do just to show that they can.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#89

This is probably obvious to anyone but there isn't anything "good" about this, I expected this to be something along the lines of a crypto donation to GiveDirectly but this is just a sick wannabe Blackmirror power play.

No post body was provided.

Re: GoodWill ransomware forces victims to donate to the poor

#90
post #85

I assumed the "goodwill" would be a donation to an association that would be a front for the hackers to get the money somehow, but it seems that it's really acts of goodwill with no real money flowing, so maybe the hackers actually believe they're doing good ?

Wouldn't any legitimate charity return money that was donated through coercion? If someone stole something and gave it to me, and the rightful owner asked for it back, I would give it back. I guess it would just look bad asking for them to return it but most people would understand.

The malware group is not asking for donations to organizations, but to individuals at the hospital. They are requiring that someone at the infected business records videos of themselves going to a hospital or health clinic, looking for people who seem like they need financial help and offering to help them pay for their medical care.

1) Good luck suing poor individuals to get your money back 2) It's hard to fathom what kind of asshole you'd have to be to walk into an ER, record a video of you offering people money to help pay their hospital bill and then demand that money back off-camera.

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