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US travel firm $4.5M ransom negotiation open chat

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

#331

Post by apta »

yyyk wrote: post #120
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…

>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…

> right now, cryptocurrency has negative value for society

It's hard to say. The current fiat system, due to predatory and parasitic practices such as the inherent interest involved in working with it, and how the government is able to control inflation at will, is absurd.

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

#332

Post by Stupulous »

yzmtf2008 wrote: post #93
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.

> "However I see a huge difference between protecting human lives versus protecting corporate assets." The idea that there are fundamental differences between human lives and corporate assets is flawed. There's a very specific value of human life: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843

The value of human life is orthogonal to economic value, and doesn't follow the same rules. It works like fine art. The price of art doesn't move towards a final value; paintings bought and sold for centuries still appreciate faster than inflation. They aren't getting any better, the only thing that's changing is the amount of money people have to spend on paintings.

Human life appreciates the same way. In some number of years the government will decide that the economy can sustain valuing human life at a trillion dollars. And they'll look back at us and see that we undervalued life in the same way that we can look back and see that the Romans undervalued human life. Lives are worth whatever we can afford.

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

#333

Post by Animats »

hellotomyrars wrote: post #40

While these stories are becoming all too common I’d like to think that while we’re in a golden age of being a ransomware payouts, it will lead to actually caring about security by many of the high-profile affected companies. While the overall cost may be low for them, if they don’t make meaningful changes to prevent these issues in the future, it’s not hard to imagine it might add up quickly. I don’t support these at…

While these stories are becoming all too common I’d like to think that while we’re in a golden age of being a ransomware payouts, it will lead to actually caring about security by many of the high-profile affected companies.

It may also lead to companies paying for a more aggressive response. Uber has been known to deal with fraud by eventually finding the fraudster, even in Nigeria, and having them "visited".[1]

[1] "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber" Isaac, (2009)

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

#334

Post by colinmhayes »

moonchild wrote: post #211
293984j29384 wrote: post #103

I found it interesting none of these sites actually provided the alleged bitcoin wallet address. I found it @ https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/13nmJ3SsNB5pSyQrmX3e6...

Probably a condition of the ransom. If the wallet address is known, then it can be blacklisted by exchanges.

Lol as if they'd just send straight to an exchange.

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

#335

Post by vmception »

jjeaff wrote: post #279
vmception wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What exchanges allow you to move that kind of money?

every trade desk anywhere

its been like this for half of bitcoin's existence

they consider themselves distinct from exchanges because they do not take custody of people's funds, in their opinion

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

#336

Post by DownGoat »

Geezus_42 wrote: post #314

How about good offline back ups? Then you don't have to pay and hope you get your data back. Of course you still need to to figure out how they got in and lock it down so it doesn't happen again and there will be downtime as things are restored. However your are already down at that point so that doesn't really make a difference and by paying you are encouraging the behavior.

They don't just start encrypting stuff as soon as they have a foothold. They spend some time on your network siphoning out valuable data, compromise backups, and staging for re-entry.

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

#337

Post by yyyk »

garmaine wrote: post #325
melq wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the person you're responding to is how you would go about banning it in the first place, not necessarily why you would ban it.

Yes that's what I meant (not sure why you were down-voted). Banning banks from doing business with bitcoin exchanges is not banning bitcoin. Banning use of bitcoin entirely is legally plausible, but technically impossible to implement without draconian internet censorship on the scale of China. It's a 100x harder to ban bitcoin than, say, bittorrent, and banning that in a free society ended up not being possible.

Well, ensuring that no one sets up a Bitcoin network from their retrofitted computers in the privacy of their home is not banning Bitcoin, at least not a useful ban that we should care to enforce.

If we can disrupt the network so that even criminals can't get ordinary people to 'pay' via the network, than it's for all practical purposes a ban.

I don't agree that banning it is harder than bittorrent. It's dramatically easier. Bittorrent doesn't have global state, so there's no one place to strike. The entire Bitcoin network depends on global consensus, and therefore there is one place to strike. If it is weakened so that it shrinks enough (how many miners will want to mine for an illegal activity?), than 50%+1 attack will be trivial for a state actor.

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

#338

Post by jobigoud »

garmaine wrote: post #330
jdietrich wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the US for example, there's an actual field in your 1040 tax return for entering income from otherwise undeclared illegal businesses. Putting your drug or extortion money there and paying taxes is not admitting guilt and can't be used against you IIRC.

What does one gain by doing this? Is there a particular incentive apart from one's own principles?

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

#339

Post by onion2k »

dannyw wrote: post #17
noodlesUK wrote: post #11

Whilst paying the ransom is often advisable in specific cases like these, it’s absolutely a bad thing for society as a whole. Seeing successes like this will encourage organised crime to keep doing this, as they know there’s gonna be a big reward. It’s like the prisoners dilemma. If people didn’t pay the ransom, there wouldn’t be ransomware. But people don’t take precautions, so they have to pay the ransom, leading t…

To be honest, just how bad of a thing is this? It’s a direct financial punishment for a company with lax security practices. It encourages greater security practices. The money is funnelled to a criminal group, but what difference does it make? Some people consider the USG to be a criminal group; many people are out on the streets for that. My tax dollars directly go to corrupt crooks and nonexistent companies claimi…

It encourages greater security practices.

I don't think it does. It puts a much more tangible value on security, which encourages businesses to do a risk analysis like 'Do we spend $1m on security every year, or accept that there's a 0.xxx probability of a $4.5m ransom every n years?' That cost base analysis is often used to reduce the value of things that aren't obvious profit centers.

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