That website is cancer. Someone has managed to make twitter look ok good.
US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
241–250 of 480 posts
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference? Cut deeply enough - take out entire companies - and people lose their jobs. People can't eat. People lose their health insurance that allows them to afford their life-saving medication. At some point, it's not just "big corporations"; it's the people that work for them, too.
Job loss is not the equivalent of death. Full stop.
That’s an incredibly naive way of viewing things. Not everyone can afford losing their job. Let’s say job loss increases your chance of dying by 5% — not an exaggeration in some communities — 20 jobs lost is exactly the same as one death.
There's a very specific value of human life: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ransom payment isn't really a theft or robbery, they didn't have to give it.
If you’re mugged, you don’t “have to give” your wallet either, but you were coerced by an external party.
I would argue those are different things because there was the threat of violence in the case of a mugging.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#244I constantly hear talk about Bitcoin not being completely anonymous, but it seems like these ransomware attacks are always requesting Bitcoin. How are they managing the Bitcoin so it's untraceable?
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#245When I was running some IT for our startup we used FreeNAS with ZFS (and had off site, borg backups), from my understanding we could just get to the last snapshot for the (unencrypted) data? (sorry, no IT admin but developer ;-)
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. >This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era.... Instead democratizing currency, we're democratizing large scale crime. Just wanted to make this same point - right now, cryptocurrency has negative value for society. Perhaps this is a justification for banning the current impleme…
We need to make laws in western countries that paying off these kinds of ransoms is illegal. It gives money to criminal elements and only encourages this. I also thought it would be possible for powerful law enforcement groups to follow the bitcoins even through exchanges. Why does this not run into the worldwide hunt for the perpetrators?
Apparently, at least in the USA, law enforcement has other priorities.
George Floyd was killed over an alleged counterfeit $20 bill.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low. The hackers are likely European, since there are telltales like European number formatting ("10.000.000$") and awkward phrases like "make a step forward" (perhaps Italian fare un passo avanti ?).
it seemed weird to me that the hacker's messages were right-justified, maybe from a country with RTL input method?
I've seen that before in crappy support chats UIs so it's probably just that.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#248Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing. We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity…
>>democratizing large scale crime
Ah give me a break, I am having a very hard time wrapping my mind around this obsession HN has for hating cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Solution to everything is to ban things we don't like, also while we are at it, lets ban credit cards too, credit-card fraud is close to 30Billion world wide[1].
People tend to focus on the bad about technology instead of all the good it can bring us, yes there are a lot of scams happening, these same scams have existed with fiat currencies too, the same thing happens every time humans come up with a new technology, everything can be used for both good and bad, and for a forum focused on technology if we start dismissing technology just because of a few bad apples what's different from us and the lunatics who run around claiming 5G gives you corona?
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#249Let this be a lesson to those that say bitcoin and other cryptocurrency has no real value outside of speculation. This kind of attack would be almost impossible in the pre-bitcoin era. The difficulty of receiving that volume of money in that short of a period of time in a difficult to trace manner is a new thing. We are entering a new era where crime can pay in very large sums with orders of magnitude less complexity…
>>democratizing large scale crime Ah give me a break, I am having a very hard time wrapping my mind around this obsession HN has for hating cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Solution to everything is to ban things we don't like, also while we are at it, lets ban credit cards too, credit-card fraud is close to 30Billion world wide[1]. People tend to focus on the bad about technology instead of all the good it can brin…
The difference is people talking about real problems and people making things up. It's an incredibly significant difference.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t a defense of Bitcoin. I’m often quite critical of cryptocurrency and believe the world would be better off without it. However, “banning” it won’t have the effects you’ve described, and you seem have some misunderstandings about how Bitcoin works, especially as it pertains to the criminal world. 1. Bitcoin transactions don’t require access to the internet at the time the transaction takes place. There have…
1. Passing keys around risks the original sender (or anyone listening in) grabbing the money after 'payment', and voids any guarantees Bitcoin etc. might be able to make - the transaction isn't even listed on the chain. This would turn a 'trustless blockchain' to a 'non-blockchain relying on trust'. Assuming this transition can even be done (what would be the point of cryptocurrency in that case?), the result would b…
That implementation of offline transactions is a poor one, so the rebuttal would be too, but the reality is that bitcoin can work with offline transactions.
You can create the transaction object and hand that over. Transferrable literally as a file.
Instead of having over notes with the private key on them.
Eventually that transaction will need to be settled onchain. This can work in a world without a familiar looking ubiquitous internet. Regional internet cafes or even radio stations can settle signed transactions. People can have stocks of transactions and they just go to the cafe to settle those and also get their updated balance.
This capability always undermines a "ban crypto" thesis, or even a "crypto doesn't survive the apocalypse when the power goes out" thesis. It is merely a concept, just like computers communicating to each other is a replicable concept even if the head of state has an internet kill switch.