I’ve always been curious about the “on-ramp” here
How does a legit company purchase $4.5M of BitCoin in 24 hours?
I would assume using a “K&R” style broker but, without one of those how would you do it?
US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
301–310 of 480 posts
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I started my career I'd always hear old greybeards talk about "oh this one time.. some certain thing happened, and everyone learnt a lesson" and I feel like I just witnessed one of those come into existence
Don’t be surprised if companies would rather roll the dice than pay whatever it costs to prevent the problem. $4 million once times the risk of getting hit vs. the up-front and ongoing costs of dealing with an overly paranoid IT guy. Tough call.
Depends if it really does end up being one time or not, I'd say
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#303Let 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…
Cryptocurrency can’t really get a fair shake at being legitimate until it’s treated by governments as currency, which means not taxing its capital gains.
Criminals don’t care about filing tax returns for digital assets, which is why we see them use it as currency. When you or I try to use it as a currency, we’d have to file a tax return if the value of it changes (at least in the US)
If we saw governments ease up on this a bit, we might see some interesting currency applications come if it, but I don’t see them letting go of that control.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I started my career I'd always hear old greybeards talk about "oh this one time.. some certain thing happened, and everyone learnt a lesson" and I feel like I just witnessed one of those come into existence
Don’t be surprised if companies would rather roll the dice than pay whatever it costs to prevent the problem. $4 million once times the risk of getting hit vs. the up-front and ongoing costs of dealing with an overly paranoid IT guy. Tough call.
How many times would you need to do a security audit before this paid for itself?
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#305Earlier 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…
> Just wanted to make this same point - right now, cryptocurrency has negative value for society. Perhaps this is a justification for banning the current implementations. Ehhhh, I think the overall impact of Bitcoin is negative, but the "democratizing large-scale crime" argument is a pretty poor argument for why that is. First, Bitcoin isn't "democratizing" anything good or bad--people need to stop using this word wi…
Even if the ransomware perpetrators aren't selling the data, do you think there is any real chance that a company that just paid millions of dollars in ransom would next go and invest more money into security?
More likely, other criminals will come knocking on the same company's systems and get that data for other purposes.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like 95%+ of bitcoin is related to financial speculation, investing, DeFi etc etc. An order of magnitude of more drugs are sold on Cash App and Venmo -- which is why they're in rap songs. As for large scale hacking, extortion and ransom, yes bitcoin is used but it is increasing difficult to cash out in a large way.
> bitcoin is used but it is increasing difficult to cash out in a large way. But its not? You can convert 50 million usd worth of bitcoin in one order without moving the market more than 1-1.5% and have a wire transfer to your bank account same day. This happens all day every day, with the markets getting deeper year by year. Trash exchanges for retail have nothing to do with the infrastructure actually out there. If…
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Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
The folks like this should actually do a startup. Hardening security is often just keeping up with and following checklists, installing proper monitoring, backup and audit software however for large majority of company it is impossible to hire competitive security specialists. These guys can scale up by hiring 100s of employees who they train on different aspects and contract with small firms like these at annual sub…
Even just hiring one guy whose only job is to take backups would solve ransomware for much cheaper.
There was a post on here a few days back about why it's not that simple. Basically, by the time your stuff is ransomed, they've potentially been in your network for a long time. There's no telling how far you have to go in your backups to make sure they are gone. Who knows, maybe they wait on your computers for several months just so restoring from backups isn't a realistic option, and punish you for trying.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would there not be a huge danger that a mixer operator, if they received $4m+ of BTC in one big transfer, could simply shut down immediately and pull what's known as an 'exit scam'? They would be in possession of the BTC and could themselves then launder it through other mixers. Perhaps they might do this if the saw keeping the entire 4m as much more lucrative than many years of taking the percentage skimmed off the…
You’d only want to use a mixer where your transaction represents a small fraction of the total volume (otherwise it doesn’t provide much anonymity). An exit scam isn’t so appealing in that case. If a mixer charges a 1% fee, with an average delay of 1 hour, the ongoing fee earns more than a one-time exit scam of all transactions in flight after just four or five days. It takes time to establish a reputable mixer and s…
Maybe I'm woefully out of touch on the scale of the BTC flowing through mixers on a daily and weekly basis, but if they can earn more than 4M USD in a year by just skimming off the 1%, that's a lot of BTC moving...
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there are any large scale positive uses of cryptocurrency, I'm sure that we would have heard of them by now; The proponents would have shouted them from the rooftops. That said, proponents do have a shot at enlightening us (me and other viewers of the thread). What large scale positive application are you aware of?
The main one I know of is international money transfers (remittances). Usually these have to go through an oligopoly that sets the fees and exchange rates to be favorable to itself. This is the kind of market that's pretty big on the international scale, but it's completely boring and non-sensational to read about a bunch of people who are sending $400 to their moms on a regular basis.
As far as I know, nearly everyone uses Western Union (Transferwise etc. etc.) for that. Bitcoin is too costly* and complicated for most people.
* Two set of fees to exchange crypto to fiat + transfer fee compared to one set of fiat currency exchange + transfer fee.
Re: US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
From what I can see, cryptocurrency is technologically frozen right now because any change results in some people making less money so there can never be a consensus on anything.