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Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

theguardian.com

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Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#41

Post by bena »

bluGill wrote: post #29
bena wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In general you are allowed to do something illegal if your life is in danger. That is if I'm kidnapped I'm allowed to pay what is otherwise a bribe to go free. 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 with…

You don't turn victims of crimes into criminals as well. This shouldn't need to be said.

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#42

Post by RobotToaster »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #14

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.

Since it was privatised it's no longer a social service, but a private corporation.

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#43

Post by sodality2 »

GalenErso wrote: post #37
sodality2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If paying ransoms become illegal in many countries, it would be very hard to find targets willing to break the law and pay ransom, making it less attractive of an attack.

I don't think this is correct. There is very little cost, and risk, in conducting ransomware attacks. So even the odd chance of finding a target willing to break the law and pay up would be worth it. And in the long term, black hat groups could put pressure on national legislatures to amend the law by following through on their threats and deleting or releasing the files they've encrypted. One can imagine a not so fa…

I think this is a little far-fetched - I'd like to believe something (legislator comes clean, fed govt investigates more thoroughly as it is a direct threat to our democracy, etc) would stop that from happening. Worse has happened, though.

I do believe that if the "market" for victims shrinks, naturally the number of ransomware attackers will shrink - sure, ransomware is "easy", but perhaps there's easier cybercrime to be committed with better odds. (I'm not sure how likely this is - I bet the ransomware scene is nowhere near saturated)

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#44

Post by clnq »

Why is ransomware still a problem? Is it that difficult to make off-site backups every hour? Storage is cheap. There are many air gapping options for backups, too.

It sounds like a case of normalized deviance, for which the management should be held accountable.

As much as I don’t like victim blaming, I think it’s beyond incompetent to still not backup your data in 2023 as a government org.

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#46

Post by personjerry »

It's fucking ridiculous to hit the postal service, providing a practically-free function to a lot of people who really need it, and operating at barely even (in US and Canada too, so I imagine other countries are similar).

The ransomers sound like kids, "speculating that the directors personally held 100m of crypto"? What a disgusting amateur job.

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#47

Post by wesleychen »

moremetadata wrote: post #12
paulpauper wrote: post #2

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.

I think you're referring to the Universal Postal Union's terminal dues, which are transfers between countries to compensate for last mile delivery imbalances. While it's true that China is in Group 2 and the UK is in Group 1 (out of 4 total groups) when calculating terminal dues, the UK is actually a net winner because it pays less to deliver mail than the amount it receives in terminal dues [0]. The UPU definitely causes distortions in the price of international shipping but it's hard to pin the privatization of Royal Mail on this issue.

[0] https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/14533_20.html

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#48

Post by [deleted] »

hyperman1 wrote: post #24
ukoki wrote: post #11

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.

As I understand it, it is indeed illegal in most countries. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#49

Post by RobotToaster »

vuln wrote: post #18
moremetadata wrote: post #12

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,…

Why does international post TO China still cost so much then?

Re: Royal Mail dismisses ‘absurd’ $80M ransom demand

#50

Post by wesleychen »

vuln wrote: post #18
moremetadata wrote: post #12

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,…

The US has already moved to self-declared rates under the 2019 UPU Extraordinary Congress agreement [0]. The reason a change was not made earlier is because the US was a net winner under the terminal dues scheme until 2014 [1] [2].

[0] https://www.cep-research.com/news/usa-claims-total-victory-i...

[1] https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/featu...

[2] https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/14533_20.html

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