Ransomware Discussion Thread

[MakersTeleMark]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQByvmX6QGY&t=126s

It think that answers all your questions.

There are very well paid firms solely dedicated to cracking Monero that are light years ahead of the $5 feds.

Good luck I say. Next question, Donny.

[schuss]

I guess 'control' is the wrong word. How about 'make excuse to make illegal'...? However that might work. Shutting down exchanges won't work. I don't know. At what point do the Feds consider BTC as a hostile threat to USD and take some sort of action?

Never. BTC doesn't matter compared to the USD. Transaction costs are prohibitive in BTC, which means it can never be used for real money movement. Crypto heads love to think of themselves as "sticking it to the man", but the structure of BTC precludes it from ever being anything truly useful unless electricity and compute suddenly become free and costless.

[MakersTeleMark]

Never. BTC doesn't matter compared to the USD. Transaction costs are prohibitive in BTC, which means it can never be used for real money movement. Crypto heads love to think of themselves as "sticking it to the man", but the structure of BTC precludes it from ever being anything truly useful unless electricity and compute suddenly become free and costless.

Well, thankfully there are over 10k other currencies to choose from. What is one to do?

[schuss]

Well, thankfully there are over 10k other currencies to choose from. What is one to do?

Seriously, why BTC when you can doge or adopt whatever the latest meme coin is? Gotta keep up with the times.

[old goat]

I guess 'control' is the wrong word. How about 'make excuse to make illegal'...? However that might work. Shutting down exchanges won't work. I don't know. At what point do the Feds consider BTC as a hostile threat to USD and take some sort of action?

A threat to the dollar? That's far fetched. A threat to national security due to ransomware, sure.

[pureantigravity]

JB meat packers paid $11M in BTC to get only part of their systems back. Thankfully they had good backups. The ransom specifically said for them to keep it "hush hush" or else it would be back PR for the company. When we hear about #institutional BTC adoption, it is probably institutions that have been ransomed and have no other choice but to buy BTC. This probably accounts for a large portion of the recent runup on crypto prices. Ransomware is a scary scenario for US businesses but a terrifying scenario for smaller businesses in less protected countries. As for the effect on market prices, they have to unload the BTC somewhere. This is going to create even more price volatility than in previous BTC bubbles. Get yer popcorn.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...irst-demanded/

"Now we're keeping it a secret, but if you do not reply us within 3 days it will be posted on our news-site. Think about the financial damage to your stock price from this publication."

[Skidog]

JB meat packers paid $11M in BTC to get only part of their systems back. Thankfully they had good backups. The ransom specifically said for them to keep it "hush hush" or else it would be back PR for the company. When we hear about #institutional BTC adoption, it is probably institutions that have been ransomed and have no other choice but to buy BTC. This probably accounts for a large portion of the recent runup on crypto prices. Ransomware is a scary scenario for US businesses but a terrifying scenario for smaller businesses in less protected countries. As for the effect on market prices, they have to unload the BTC somewhere. This is going to create even more price volatility than in previous BTC bubbles. Get yer popcorn.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...irst-demanded/

"Now we're keeping it a secret, but if you do not reply us within 3 days it will be posted on our news-site. Think about the financial damage to your stock price from this publication."

Nothing to see here.... Move along

Sent from my Pixel 4a (5G) using TGR Forums mobile app

[carpathian]

A threat to the dollar? That's far fetched. A threat to national security due to ransomware, sure.

Isn't that one of the main talking point held by the BTC maximalists? The USD is inflationary (and inherently unfair and probably racist), therefore inferior, therefore BTC is the answer to solve all the worlds problems?

So not a threat to USD, but a viable alternative that could undermine the USD value if it gains enough momentum and become a perceived threat to US hegemony in general ?

China already thinks it is a threat for it own reason. And yeah I'm partly blending USD and US government as one entity
for the sake of argument.

FWIW my take on crypto in general has gone like this:

1) its amazing gonna change the world
2) its a Ponzi scheme but I know it and can predict whale movements and make money
3) its a Ponzi scheme that I don't have time to play properly so I won't play at all
4) ive never been to Vegas, maybe I like gambling with life savings after all
5) I am paper handed and don't want too risk money on slot machine
6) return to previous investment vehicle in real estate that I may or may not be transacting in BTC in the future after social coercion by our Crypto Overlords.

And it hards to ignore the religious undertones as people rush to fill the void in their hearts as we live in an increasingly secular world.

[schuss]

Like I said before, BTC can't supplant USD as transaction costs are somewhere on the order of 500k more expensive electricity wise for transfers. The market abhors transactional losses and what makes USD powerful is it's universal scale and acceptance, which BTC can't match due to structural design decisions (as it's designed to automatically get more expensive due to mining difficulty scaling).

[Bunion 2020]

On June 3, FBI Director Christopher Wray gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal during which he compared the deluge of ransomware attacks emanating from Russia to 9/11. This comparison is even more correct than Wray was willing to say. Because the 9/11 comparison creates us a useful framework for assessing America’s posture towards Russia.

The big geostrategic lesson of 9/11 was that ungoverned territory could present a threat to the American homeland. Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center, President Bush gave the Taliban the option to give up Al Qaeda. They declined, which was when he declared that states who harbored terrorists would be held as accountable as the terrorists themselves. The Taliban either controlled the territory where Al Qaeda had hatched the 9/11 plot—in which case it was a rogue state. Or the Taliban did not control the territory, which meant that it was a failed state.

The new wave of cyberterrorism emanating from Russia is clearly analogous. Is Russia 11 time zones of ungoverned digital territory? Or is it a rogue nation sanctioning the attacks emanating from within its borders? Is it North Korea or Afghanistan? Will Vladimir Putin give up the hackers? Or does he not have control over his own country? The choices are pretty binary.

The criminality of the ransomware attacks and questions about any covert links to the Kremlin are beside the point. Even if the intelligence community had ironclad proof of a covert Kremlin connection, good luck trying to prove that to the world.

The uncomfortable implication is that Russia either cannot control its territory or has no fear about economic warfare being launched against the United States from its territory. Even if the answer is both, the world should be hearing something other than soothing rhetoric as President Biden heads to his half-baked, ill-advised summit with Russian President Putin on the sidelines of the G7.

Biden knows that Putin weaponizes corruption. He knows that Putin, who cannot afford a competent military, leans on criminals to undermine the West. Biden wrote as much in a 2018 Foreign Affairs essay. And subsequently I and three other coauthors wrote about how authoritarians such as Putin seed the battlespace with criminals in an effort to undermine the West. All of this is known. On June 4 the Biden administration declared that strategic corruption had become a top-tier national security threat.

In other words, Biden knows that these hackers serve Putin’s purpose and that Putin has not shown any interest (or ability) to stop them. Biden also knows that the FBI is investigating around 100 current cases, mostly Russian in origin. The U.S. faces a systematic, Russian threat.

Yet, during a June 6 interview with Axios, Secretary of State Tony Blinken said, “We would prefer to have a more stable, predictable relationship with Russia.” The next day explaining away the administration’s gift to Putin of his most worrisome geopolitical project, yet, Nord Stream II, Blinken told the House Foreign Affairs Committee “The physical completion of the pipeline was, I think, a fait accompli . . . I think we have an opportunity to make something positive out of a bad hand that we inherited when we came into office.”

In 1998, when Al Qaeda perpetrated multiple terror attacks from Sudan, politicians resisted sober calls to action. Instead, President Bill Clinton shot cruise missiles at baby milk factories. The rest is history.

Any casual observer can see an increase in the operational tempo of ransomware attacks, as well as the increase in their ambition. Two of the most recent attacks—the Colonial Pipeline and the JBS meat producer attacks—were systemically important enough that they caused macroeconomic ripples for America. It does not take too much imagination to realize that these attacks, if not stopped, could cause political hiccups for the administration by putting a drag on the economy. They could even be used to interfere in future U.S. elections.

How many ransomware attacks do we need to witness before the Biden administration makes the uncomfortable connection that Putin’s Russia may not be all that dissimilar from the Taliban’s Afghanistan? Biden’s entire agenda for his upcoming Russia summit should be to give Putin a chance to give up the hackers, and to make clear that if he does not, the United States will take care of the threat—a process that will not spare Putin’s government.

But Wussia

[pureantigravity]

But without ransomware attack BTC won't have institutional "adoption". Without that the world won't be liberated from the shackles of the current banking system. I can't see that a world without BTC has any positives. If you can't secure your computers then you deserve whatever Putin delivers. /s

[old goat]

It's very clear what Xi and China want. It is clear what the Taliban want. It is clear what radical Islamists want. Because we know what they want we know how to fight them. What is not clear is what Putin and Russia want, unless it is just trolling us on an enormous scale and trying to make this country as dysfunctional as Russia, which makes it very difficult to fight back. There is one thing we can do--ban crypto, make it illegal for anyone to buy and sell it, impose sanctions on every bank--foreign or domestic--that transacts crypto. No bank in the world wants to risk running afoul of the US banking system.

It would not surprise me if the sole purpose in creating crypto was to facilitate criminal enterprises. The actions the US has taken against money laundering have been reasonably effective in making crime at least more difficult and and less lucrative. Crypto was the response, with a layer of bullshit ideology to give it respectability and suck in enough innocent people to make it politically difficult for governments to shut it down, wiping out a lot of people's life savings.

[glademaster]

It's very clear what Xi and China want. It is clear what the Taliban want. It is clear what radical Islamists want. Because we know what they want we know how to fight them. What is not clear is what Putin and Russia want, unless it is just trolling us on an enormous scale and trying to make this country as dysfunctional as Russia, which makes it very difficult to fight back. There is one thing we can do--ban crypto, make it illegal for anyone to buy and sell it, impose sanctions on every bank--foreign or domestic--that transacts crypto. No bank in the world wants to risk running afoul of the US banking system.

It would not surprise me if the sole purpose in creating crypto was to facilitate criminal enterprises. The actions the US has taken against money laundering have been reasonably effective in making crime at least more difficult and and less lucrative. Crypto was the response, with a layer of bullshit ideology to give it respectability and suck in enough innocent people to make it politically difficult for governments to shut it down, wiping out a lot of people's life savings.

Bravo! This deserves a standing ovation.

[old goat]

Bravo! This deserves a standing ovation.

Louder. I can't hear you. My sarcasm meter is drowning you out.

[pureantigravity]

Huge. This will be hundreds possibly thousands of businesses attacked in one fell swoop. This already involves four MSPs (managed service providers). The fallout from this will be huge.

"Ransomware attack on software manager hits 200 companies: Kaseya, an international company that remotely controls programs for companies, said it was attacked by hackers and warned all customers to immediately stop using its service."

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/securit...anies-rcna1338

[riser4]

One swell foop. Cyber war.

[pureantigravity]

One foul swoop. Imagine the cleanup.

[liv2ski]

It's very clear what Xi and China want. It is clear what the Taliban want. It is clear what radical Islamists want. Because we know what they want we know how to fight them. What is not clear is what Putin and Russia want, unless it is just trolling us on an enormous scale and trying to make this country as dysfunctional as Russia, which makes it very difficult to fight back. There is one thing we can do--ban crypto, make it illegal for anyone to buy and sell it, impose sanctions on every bank--foreign or domestic--that transacts crypto. No bank in the world wants to risk running afoul of the US banking system.

It would not surprise me if the sole purpose in creating crypto was to facilitate criminal enterprises. The actions the US has taken against money laundering have been reasonably effective in making crime at least more difficult and and less lucrative. Crypto was the response, with a layer of bullshit ideology to give it respectability and suck in enough innocent people to make it politically difficult for governments to shut it down, wiping out a lot of people's life savings.

I know nuthin about Crypto (other than my gut tells me it is a ponzi scheme) so OG's comments seem true. Just another reason to steer wide of that stuff as in light of the criminal activity floating around it, I would ban it.

[up an down]

It's very clear what Xi and China want. It is clear what the Taliban want. It is clear what radical Islamists want. Because we know what they want we know how to fight them. What is not clear is what Putin and Russia want, unless it is just trolling us on an enormous scale and trying to make this country as dysfunctional as Russia, which makes it very difficult to fight back. There is one thing we can do--ban crypto, make it illegal for anyone to buy and sell it, impose sanctions on every bank--foreign or domestic--that transacts crypto. No bank in the world wants to risk running afoul of the US banking system.

It would not surprise me if the sole purpose in creating crypto was to facilitate criminal enterprises. The actions the US has taken against money laundering have been reasonably effective in making crime at least more difficult and and less lucrative. Crypto was the response, with a layer of bullshit ideology to give it respectability and suck in enough innocent people to make it politically difficult for governments to shut it down, wiping out a lot of people's life savings.

Well said

[pureantigravity]

"In Sweden, most of grocery chain Coop’s more than 800 stores couldn’t open on Saturday after the attack led to a malfunction of their cash registers, spokesperson Therese Knapp told Bloomberg News."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...source=twitter

It is paywalled. It worked for me opening the link in an incognito tab.

[RShea]

A recent discussion on IT Business on questions like:

Should you be accepting payments or paying for services with Crypto Currency?
Are crypto payments as secret and hard to track as we once thought?
Is it illegal to pay ransomware?
Why do you or should you care about the US Treasury Department or OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control)?
Can you write off ransomware payments as business expenses?

[old goat]

Seems to me the hackers are getting greedy. As the impact of ransomware becomes greater and greater governments are going to be forced to ban crypto.

[riser4]

Seems to me the hackers are getting greedy. As the impact of ransomware becomes greater and greater governments are going to be forced to ban crypto.

Therefore effectively a near zero sum game, players trying to cash in before it's too late.

[pureantigravity]

Crosspost: Don't miss this chick's story of how she busted a ransomware crews plans.
https://www.tetongravity.com/forums/...01#post6350001