Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.
Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)
North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
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Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are these scenarios "use cases" for a mixer and not critical flaws in the underlying system? We're in a thread about a rogue state using the tech to steal money to fund their operations (Chemical attacks in airports, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, etc.) How many nuclear detonations would you consider acceptable in exchange for the cryptobros to have their toys?
Side note, I find it interesting that "bros" is now a pejorative - cryptobros, techbros. Are there other instances? We've come a long way from Mario Bros!
Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#133I wonder how many ICBM can that get you... probably like 3 or something... - Found my answer: https://www.brookings.edu/what-nuclear-weapons-delivery-syst... Not a lot...
..I mean...one of those in Seoul is WWIII and MAD of all of Asia...so like...isn't that enough?
Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 99% of BTC mixers' volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, arms or human trafficking, it's not exactly hard to demonize mixing itself. I have no data to base this on, but I assume that privacy absolutists are a tiny, tiny drop in the pool of blood and crime.
do you feel the same way about Tor? If 99% of Tor's volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, distributing CSAM, etc, should it be demonized as well?
Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#135Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#136Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not bad for a supposedly backwards repressed regime What do you mean by supposedly? > It also exposes a wider problem the crypto community are not addressing. What wider problem? That money (in any form) can be stolen by a malevolent state?
> What do you mean by supposedly? The DPRK is often portrayed as incompetent, helpless state purely able to eke out an existence by the grace of China (to whom it is useful only as a sort of attack dog cum buffer state). So the fact that they've managed to run an operation that can steal this much crypto may come as a surprise to many. I don't imagine their intelligence agencies are quite on the same level of electro…
What limited that before were the protections built in to the real banking system. Stealing a billion dollars and actually getting away with it was hard until cryptocurrencies were introduced with far fewer safeguards.
Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#138Estimated GDP of North-Korea is around $16B (2019); just for context.
Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#139[1]CIA world fact book and world bank (both a few years old)
Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that they don't exist, but the easiest way to gain access to a computer system is always going to be to ask for the password. https://xkcd.com/538/
I have no evidence for this, but my feeling was always that the highest-volume exploits were just having a bot run yesterday's Day-0 on every IP listening on a port. You can't get that kind of volume by calling people and asking for their password. If you leave an unsecured mail server accessible to the internet, it'll start sending spam emails within 30 minutes. On the other hand, phishing emails are also automated,…
But we can broadly categorize security incidents into two bins: first are opportunistic attackers which broadly attempt a method that sometimes works. Two common examples are minimally-targeted phishing emails (think Best Buy invoice) and automated scanning for old versions of WordPress with known vulnerabilities. Second are targeted attacks, where the attacker chooses a target and then attempts different methods to reach success. Overall targeted attacks are far less common than opporunitistic ones, but because they involve a higher level of effort they're only attempted when there's a high level of motivation. Targeted attacks tend to result in greater financial losses than opportunistic attacks, for example, because compromising machines to add them to a botnet usually isn't worth the effort of a targeted attack, but getting banking credentials or crypto wallets usually is.
All of information security is fairly bimodal in this way. It often seems like even technical professionals like software engineers struggle to understand basic security practices, but I think this is one of the biggest causes: most people tend to think about one case and ignore the other. Unfortunately one of the things that makes security very difficult is that both cases are real and the two require fairly different practices to deter, prevent, and detect.
Social methods are far more common with targeted attacks because "true" social engineering involves a higher level of effort, like time on the phone. That said, phishing falls into an in-between where some consider it to be a social method but it is amenable to widespread automation. There's also a wide spectrum of effort in phishing. Many are tempted to try to categorize phishing activity into a binary of "phishing" and "spear-phishing" (I hate these terms), but that doesn't really reflect reality very well. In a large corporation you can usually find examples of phishing that are targeted to varying degrees of specificity: at anyone, at corporate employees broadly, at people in the industry, at employees of a company, a department in that company, and even carefully tailored to a specific employee. The frequency of course tails off as you get more specific, but then it's not that unusual for some organized crime group to run a sustained campaign of fairly closely-targeted phishing as happened recently with Twilio.
Opportunistic attacks are certainly greater in volume to the extent that some call them "internet background noise," but most think that targeted attacks probably produce greater total financial damage. Security is very faddish though, not only on the defense side but also on the offense side, so it probably varies from year to year. For example, the emergence of ransomware was a major trend that required a strategic shift in defense in many organizations since ransomware attacks were fairly low effort but also very high damage in many cases.