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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

#351

Post by sqrt17 »

greesil wrote: post #98
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…

Think of it as a very expensive bug bounty.

Bug bounties work well for publically accessible systems, e.g. a site's web service. As a result, many of the more visible break-ins occur through phishing or spear-phishing and combine social engineering with malware as well as classical intrusion techniques from within the network perimeter.

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

#352

Post by csomar »

sytelus wrote: post #87
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…

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…

> With their current approach they will almost certainly get traced eventually and end up in jail.

Depends. If they are a couple guys (or a single guy), and it's a one shot for him, he has very good odds of getting away with it. Cleanly launder his BTC and then move somewhere not suspicious and keep a low profile. At the end of the day, $4m is not that much money (ie: not able to afford multiple Ferraris).

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

#353

Post by HenryBemis »

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.

Police/authorities want to do that because (perhaps) there is a connection between crime and terrorism. Meaning that, if you pay $100m to the kidnapper, 50% of that amount will end up funding . They want to drain this to the lowest possible amount.

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

#354

Post by csomar »

gruez wrote: post #158
jhgorrell wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda funny to see 1BTC sent to check it worked before they sent the rest. Cant undo it like a wire transfer...

But why 1 BTC? That's worth more than 10k. Surely they could have sent a fraction? Or maybe they didn't know bitcoins can be split?

1 BTC is a fraction of 400BTC

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

#355

Post by HenryBemis »

chrisrogers wrote: post #169
eckza wrote: post #71

Earlier 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.

Tell that to a family where both parents are unemployed, they got 2-3 kids, a mortgage, a couple of maxed credit cards, they used to live paycheck-to-paycheck, one of the kids needs special care that the state doesn't provide due to budget cuts.

Now take this scenario to every major financial crisis (e.g. USA today, Latin America for the past couple of decades, some EU countries hit 20-30% unemployment a decade ago, and are still recovering).

It won't kill them instantly but consider what it does to them, if it turns them to crime, alcoholism, depression, and the general impact on the quality of life.

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

#356

Post by csomar »

paulcole wrote: post #52
adamparsons wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

It's more than $4m though. The company was at real risk of imploding and going out of business. I guess that scared the CEO more than the $4m penalty.

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

#357

Post by bananaface »

walrus01 wrote: post #308
shajznnckfke wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In that case, you split your initial sum and run through multiple sequential series in parallel. You produce more crackable sequences, but you still need to crack an entire sequence to trace the owner.

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

#359

Post by frodo_77 »

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…

"once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane."

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

#360

Post by scandox »

danbmil99 wrote: post #358

Why not pay the ransom, then track down the perpetrators for an uncomfortable private chat with hired paramilitary types? There has to be a stick or these folk will keep demanding more carrots.

What spend another few million on an illegal adventure well outside their area of expertise? Great idea. Why not reintroduce blood feuds to the Toy manufacturing business too!
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