401–410 of 480 posts
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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?
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> It’s sad that it’s come to this point but the end result may be better for everyone. Meanwhile in the real world, a company I develop for implemented the most draconian security measures to "prevent ransomware". Development environment is a virtual machine at the other end of the world, with disabled copy-pasting from and to the local system. A complete separation between safe internal network and unsafe developmen…
How do top tier tech companies, who are very likely continuous targets for this kind of thing, avoid ransomware attacks? I know there's nothing like that at my employer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s sad that it’s come to this point but the end result may be better for everyone. Meanwhile in the real world, a company I develop for implemented the most draconian security measures to "prevent ransomware". Development environment is a virtual machine at the other end of the world, with disabled copy-pasting from and to the local system. A complete separation between safe internal network and unsafe developmen…
How do top tier tech companies, who are very likely continuous targets for this kind of thing, avoid ransomware attacks? I know there's nothing like that at my employer.
1) App whitelisting. This is not the strongest mitigation (attackers with exploits can move in memory), but it stops drive-bys and 99% of malware, plus it massively reduces noise on the network.
2) Reduce lateral movement. If the attacker accesses an employee laptop, encrypts it, but can't move to other devices, that's not a very compelling ransom.
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…
They didn't object to the idea insomuch as they had somehow convinced themselves that they needed some kind of security specific product. We were never able to tease the shape or color beyond a silver bullet.
When basic business continuity planning with simple tools that companies should have anyway for a dozen reasons still aren't deployed, I'm pessimistic that this phenomenon is going away anytime soon.
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]…
Finding the eBook on Amazon then quote-Googling for verbatim sections of text doesn't always work, but there are sometimes nice exceptions :)
For anyone who wants to save 5 minutes, data:text/plain;base64,R29vZ2xlICJpc2FhYzIwMTkucGRmIiA8LS0gaW5jbHVkaW5nIHF1b3Rlcw
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clicked through the transactions and found this wallet: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/17A16QmavnUfCW11DAApi... a balance of 16m and over 1.4 trillon usd has passed through this account. the oldest transaction i could find was 2019-11-02 14:19: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/17A16QmavnUfCW11DAApi...
I would assume one address with 377k transactions that has seen over 131 million BTC move through it strongly implies it's some sort of tumbler address. I'm not sure why reusing one address like this would make any sense though...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do top tier tech companies, who are very likely continuous targets for this kind of thing, avoid ransomware attacks? I know there's nothing like that at my employer.
There are two big things you want to do: 1) App whitelisting. This is not the strongest mitigation (attackers with exploits can move in memory), but it stops drive-bys and 99% of malware, plus it massively reduces noise on the network. 2) Reduce lateral movement. If the attacker accesses an employee laptop, encrypts it, but can't move to other devices, that's not a very compelling ransom.
You don't known Carbon Black is there until something doesn't work. That "not working" propagates an alert up to the security team.
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…
My thoughts, also. It's obvious why they don't, but ideally, every business would take a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" stance on this. Could governments outlaw these ransom payments?
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There are two big things you want to do: 1) App whitelisting. This is not the strongest mitigation (attackers with exploits can move in memory), but it stops drive-bys and 99% of malware, plus it massively reduces noise on the network. 2) Reduce lateral movement. If the attacker accesses an employee laptop, encrypts it, but can't move to other devices, that's not a very compelling ransom.
As someone who runs a Banks internal Red Team group, the App Whitelisting is the biggest roadblock for us. Carbon Black (if properly setup and tuned) is a large leap to overcome. Drive-by attacks just stop, you need a dedicated method to bypass Carbon Black. That is usually very org dependent. You don't known Carbon Black is there until something doesn't work. That "not working" propagates an alert up to the security…
a) You just kill ~85% of malware (rough estimate, probably technically higher, but I'm basing that on stats around interpreter-based/LOLBAS malware). Anything that isn't targeted is probably dead in the water.
b) You know exactly what's running on everyone's computers, more or less, so you have a way easier time baselining and building monitoring.
It's honestly easy-mode for security. But it's hard to roll out to a company a decade after it's been running, so you really need to do it early on. And most orgs don't care about security until after a breach, at which point they're too large and slow to get something like that done.
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> 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…
What harm reduction happens when the 'large entities' are the courts[0], municipalities[1] or even hospitals[2]? Alleged better safeguarding of our data* isn't worth it. * I suspect that right now companies find it cheaper to pay than to improve their security. [0] https://wtop.com/national/2020/05/texas-high-courts-hit-by-r... [1] https://www.msspalert.com/cybersecurity-research/municipalit... [2] https://www.wwnytv…
Aren't these the entities that you would most want to keep your data secure?
> Alleged better safeguarding of our data* isn't worth it.
> * I suspect that right now companies find it cheaper to pay than to improve their security.
That makes no sense, because if you don't improve your security, you'll be hacked in the same way again. There isn't an upper bound on how much it can cost to not improve your security.