What is the difference between a computer ransom and a human kidnapping and ransoming situation? If I’m not allowed to pay ransom to save my business, does it means I should be also not allowed to pay ransom to save my loved ones?
Yes.
The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
91–100 of 173 posts
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#92It's kind of crazy to me that large companies are even able to make large, anonymous, unbudgeted, essentially cash payments (with no paper trail) at all.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#93It's kind of crazy to me that large companies are even able to make large, anonymous, unbudgeted, essentially cash payments (with no paper trail) at all.
Deontology sounds great until reality hits. Then you do whatever is best.
Your company's policies are subordinate to its survival.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#94Does banning ransom payments really work? It just seems to create a service industry to pay on ransomed’s behalf.
Bans have helped fight other protection rackets. Businesses are less willing to comply with the mob when the government is swinging a bigger stick. And payments/criminal rewards get pressured down when it’s blatantly illegal
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Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#95Good. as someone who works in cybersecurity, I think hackers should get $0 from the victim, possibly get caught by police, and I think companies that get hacked should have to sit with their actions and DO BETTER for their customers.
Yep. Make it a crime to pay ransoms. No data is worth enabling and enriching criminals. Have tested backups stored offsite. If you fail at that, then you fail at business and deserve to go out of business.
How would these companies survive if their systems caught fire, or had some kind of programmatic major data corruption, these companies that "can't survive" without paying the ransom perhaps needed to die, their management doesn't value business continuity.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
good on your employee who pulled the plug first and asked questions later-- that's the sign of an organization where people aren't afraid to do the right thing. very scary situation.
It's always easy to say good on the employee who acted and stopped the problem The question is what happens with an employee who acted when there wasn't a problem?
Layoff. They were costing the company money for irrelevant problems.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would seem the unintended consequences of such a policy would be to ensure every cyber breach is kept entirely secret (so that ransom payments could be made discreetly) It will show up somewhere in the tax filings. There's no such thing as discreet payments unless it's in such small amounts that it comes from petty cash. And since the ransomers are demanding payment in crypocurrency, it's even easier to spot for…
> It will show up somewhere in the tax filings. There's no such thing as discreet payments unless it's in such small amounts that it comes from petty cash. Create a shell company in some remote tax haven with lax disclosure laws, have them pay the ransom, and close the shell company afterwards. Companies are already good at dodging taxes this way.
> Create a shell company in some remote tax haven with lax disclosure laws, have them pay the ransom, and close the shell company afterwards. Companies are already good at dodging taxes this way.
That only works for hiding income, not hiding expenses.
You create a shell company in Malta (for example). Now how do you get $$$ into that company so that it can pay the ransom?
Okay, so you assign your payment to $MALTA-COMPANY the line-item of 'consulting fees'. It only takes a few companies to do this before the tax authorities are wise to it.
After all, even for relatively tiny amounts companies still have to perform KYC on customers!.
Think about it this way: if it was that easy to hide expenses from authorities, embezzlement schemes would be a lot simpler than they are now.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
good on your employee who pulled the plug first and asked questions later-- that's the sign of an organization where people aren't afraid to do the right thing. very scary situation.
It's always easy to say good on the employee who acted and stopped the problem The question is what happens with an employee who acted when there wasn't a problem?
The answer from Toyota, where this kind of thing (anyone can stop the assembly line if they think there's a problem) originally came from: if the employee reasonably believed there was a problem, they suffer no consequences (and perhaps even get a merit) for pulling the red cord. Because you lose much more money next time there's a real problem, if no-one dares to stop the machine.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#99The blackmail part is already illegal, so the criminals wont care one way or another. It's the victims that would now have two problems: damned if they pay, damned if they dont. It's not like the criminals will be at any increased risk or effort either. They're criminal operations already doing other criminal stuff, most of the work is automated (via viruses, bots, etc), and they already couldn't take the payments op…
Yeah, this sounds like one of those many, many ideas to "do something" that just make the problem worse and/or create a new problem.
Re: The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
That worked because the terrorism in question was Islamist - neither Russia, China nor Iran have any desire in having such groups grow powerful enough to be a threat to their interests, so it was in their interest to cooperate enough with the Western nations to quash the threat.
I think kidnapping for ransom is not a only a terrorism activity. Yes there are many cases of that but the majority will be related more with organized crime which usually enrich in weak and unstable government. There is correlation between terrorists activity and unstable countries but that is not always cause and effect relation. I.e you will find high statistics of kidnapping for ransom in Latin amaerica and even…
Yeah but the threshold for Western governments to engage in foreign, local stuff is very high. It's almost exclusively
- some country or its exiled representatives directly ask for aid , e.g. against narco empires, but it's nowhere near a given that we react (e.g. Haiti, who has been begging for help for years now)
- it threatens international shipping safety on popular trade routes, e.g. the Houthis in Yemen or Somalian pirates... and it's funny that the shipping co's complaining the loudest until military intervention comes are the ones who refuse to fly their ships under Western flags.
- islamists threatening to spread their terrorism to other countries
And that's it. Our general publics aren't very happy any more to spend trillions of dollars on oil grab operations or even on desperately needed support such as in Ukraine.