21–30 of 108 posts
I bought some candy from Amazon that was shipped by Royal Mail, and it never arrived. Amazon told me to take up the refund with Royal Mail, with no instructions how to do so. Anyone know how I can get a refund from Amazon/Royal Mail for the candy they never sent?
If Russia were to physically disrupt a country's social services by force, it would be an act of war. Here they have disrupted a British social service without force by state sponsored hacker terrorists, rendering harm in the physical world. The line gets blurrier.
If the Russian STATE did this yes. But we don't generally consider the act of citizens/organizations/criminal enterprises within a state as a state action unless it's clearly state sponsored. You definitely could make that argument, but it's not a given.
For example, we don't consider the 3000 British people fighting alongside Ukraine against the Russians [1] to be part of the UK state, so their fighting isn't an act of war either.
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-war-3-000-british-volunte...
How is it even legal to pay ransoms? Surely this is transferring money to criminal enterprises. If it is not illegal it needs to be made illegal.
Making the payment of ransom illegal just means you never hear about ransoms again.
How is it even legal to pay ransoms? Surely this is transferring money to criminal enterprises. If it is not illegal it needs to be made illegal.
What happens in practice is the victim hires a 'data recovery specialist' company, provides them the encrypted files, and ask them to decrypt them with their magic algorithms. The data recovery specialist coincidentally is paid a little bit more than the ransom. The specialist then contacts the hackers, pays the ransom, decrypts the files, and provides them back to the victim. Specialist, victim and maybe also law enforcement do their utmost best not to ask/explain how exactly the files were decrypted, citing e.g. trade secrets or an accidental key leak in the malware.
The data recovery specialist generally hires a contractor, who hires a contractor, who ... , so ransom money trail passes trough plenty of jurisdictions to darken the trail.
How is it even legal to pay ransoms? Surely this is transferring money to criminal enterprises. If it is not illegal it needs to be made illegal.
Why would it not be legal? If I was a hacker, the existence of a law prohibiting businesses from paying cyber ransoms would not deter me. If a company wanted to follow the law and refused to pay the ransom the hackers asked of them, the hackers could follow through and delete or irreparably corrupt their files. The potential upside, that they pay the ransom, is significant, while the downside, that they don't, doesn'…
lol this is Royal Mail, not Google. It's not like it has $80 million sitting around. Maybe they should have been more flexible. That's usually how you negotiate: start with a lot and work to something smaller that the counterparty will agree on. Done-in by greed and got $0, which they deserve. Shows how even the rules of negotiation applies to dark markets.
Royal Mail was privatised because 1st world state postal systems have to subsidise the postal systems of 3rd world countries. Its an international agreement which has come back to bite the UK because China is still classed as a 3rd world country. Lets just say the globalist's who set the rule's are finding their rules are now not so good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Royal Mail was privatised because 1st world state postal systems have to subsidise the postal systems of 3rd world countries. Its an international agreement which has come back to bite the UK because China is still classed as a 3rd world country. Lets just say the globalist's who set the rule's are finding their rules are now not so good.
The US has a similar agreement with China. "The new 1969 agreement included terminal dues, the receiving postal agencies would charge the country of origin for delivering the post on by-weight basis. To be blunt, shipping from China to USA (and most of the rest of the world) is much cheaper than shipping domestically in USA because the terminal-dues are much too low and account only for the total weight of the post,…
Those Spooky Hackers from Russia..... Is this what Trump called Fake News?
I've seen how security services can burn a stock market listed company for an agenda knowing the public have short term memories for some things, and share prices recover.
If Russia were to physically disrupt a country's social services by force, it would be an act of war. Here they have disrupted a British social service without force by state sponsored hacker terrorists, rendering harm in the physical world. The line gets blurrier.
> If Russia were to physically disrupt a country's social services by force, it would be an act of war If the Russian STATE did this yes. But we don't generally consider the act of citizens/organizations/criminal enterprises within a state as a state action unless it's clearly state sponsored. You definitely could make that argument, but it's not a given. For example, we don't consider the 3000 British people fightin…
[1] https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/fbi-disrupts-hive-rans... [2] https://therecord.media/canadas-largest-childrens-hospital-s...
How is it even legal to pay ransoms? Surely this is transferring money to criminal enterprises. If it is not illegal it needs to be made illegal.
Should we also make it illegal to get mugged? Make it a crime to be murdered? Making the payment of ransom illegal just means you never hear about ransoms again.
So we should make getting mugged illegal, so long as the law is clear that the illegal part only applies if you have a reasonable way to get away from the mugging without paying. I'm not sure how you can be mugged and yet have a reasonable way to get away without paying, I leave that question to the reader.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument seems implausible as it assumes that hackers would persist in deleting data, whereas in reality, they would probably shift their focus to other targets such as private companies that lack similar prohibitions. It is unclear what incentive they would have to continue hacking public companies if they cannot profit from that?
> It is unclear what incentive they would have to continue hacking public companies if they cannot profit from that. The intent would be to put pressure on national legislatures to repeal laws that make paying ransoms illegal. Smart ransomware groups don't care about targets that can't afford to pay. So any "inability" to pay is either the result of stubbornness or a law, both of which can change if enough pressure i…
Completely legal.