Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 480 posts

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#281

Post by jjeaff »

rudolph9 wrote: post #173
momokoko wrote: post #92

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. 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…

This is such a regressive mindset. Why not ban the encryption while we’re at it? Instead of bashing it, how about we come up with solutions to the problems?

Encryption has shown itself to have innumerable good uses. What legitimate utility has crypto currency provided?

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#282

Post by istjohn »

vmception wrote: post #260
istjohn wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your logic, bank robbers are simply a manifestation of market forces. What did you expect to happen with all that cash in one place with no armed guards?

That analogy only works if banks were paying people to pretend to rob them all day every day and show them how they did it, and also underpaying them. so, no.

Actually, you're making my point for me. Banks don't typically hire physical pen testers at all, and yet our reaction to a bank robbery is not, "Well, that's just what you get for not taking security seriously." Nor is that our reaction when a gas station gets held up.

In a perfect world, everyone can be trusted, and we don't need locks on our doors or passwords on our phones. In a dystopia, everyone has to carry a gun or have a bodyguard to leave their fortified homes, and a quarter of GDP goes towards security measures. We're somewhere in the middle, but things like this push us a little further down the road to more sunk costs in security measures.

A locksmith might make a killing after a local crime wave, but they should understand that crime is bad for the neighborhood regardless. Cyber crime raises demand for white hat services, but what's good for white hats is not necessarily good for society at large.

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#283

Post by yyyk »

malikNF wrote: post #248
momokoko wrote: post #92

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. 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…

Credit card fraud is 'some people steal credit card numbers and (eventually) steal some funds'. It's not good, but it doesn't have the major disruptive effects ransoming an hospital has.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033925

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#284

Post by chottocharaii »

Pxtl wrote: post #246
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was a municipal police call-out.

That said, slashing the municipal police isn’t a terrible idea

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#285

Post by smegma2 »

Pxtl wrote: post #246
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're confusing two different areas of law enforcement.

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#286

Post by dgoldstein0 »

yyyk wrote: post #283
malikNF wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

Credit card fraud is 'some people steal credit card numbers and (eventually) steal some funds'. It's not good, but it doesn't have the major disruptive effects ransoming an hospital has. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033925

and usually the credit card companies reverse the charges, and bear the cost. so it's quite different.

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#287

Post by markdown »

malikNF wrote: post #248
momokoko wrote: post #92

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. 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…

> everything can be used for both good and bad

I'd love to hear from you about all the good that Bitcoin has brought. Please enlighten us.

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#288

Post by hnick »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #50
nradov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general paying off kidnappers is also a bad policy. However I see a huge difference between protecting human lives versus protecting corporate assets.

Reading "Never Split The Difference" - sounds like the police will work with families pay off kidnappers is some countries, but get it down from millions to a token amount. I think he aims for zero though most of the time.

I liked the part about delaying the negotiations until Friday in (I think) Haiti, because they realised a lot of kidnappers just wanted money to blow partying on the weekend. They got away with paying a lot less.

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#289

Post by jdietrich »

vkou wrote: post #235
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's theoretically possible for powerful state-level adversaries to follow bitcoins through tumblers and exchanges (If they operate the former). Also, at some point, you're going to have to be paying rent, so you'll need to turn your BTC into dollars or pezos or pieces of eight, and may need to explain to your friendly tax authorities how you can by 4.5 million USD worth of BTC. In practice, though, it's not clear wh…

In a lot of jurisdictions, your friendly tax authorities won't ask or care; international fraud is a valuable source of foreign currency for many countries as long as you're reasonably discreet about it. Banks and payment processors can't afford to be nearly as blasé, because they're at far greater risk of facing international sanctions; Bitcoin provides an essential layer of obfuscation and deniability.

Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

#290

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

5986043handy wrote: post #229
zenexer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I refuted some of your arguments above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24033759 ), I agree that cryptocurrency has fairly limited utility, especially given the costs. The biggest issue I have with cryptocurrency is that it’s an utter waste of resources. It incentivizes the consumption of electricity (and talent) purely to print money, rather than to produce value. Yes, currencies provide some value to…

The waste of electricity/mining gear is mostly due to Proof of Work consensus, but moving to Proof of Stake/other consensus algorithms will eliminate basically all waste (eg. Ethereum is moving to PoS).

I feel like I've been hearing about ethereum proof of stake for years. When are they actually going to move to it?
Post reply on HN