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Comment by desdiv | Hacker News Reader

I bet the malware author is really regretting not translating the ransom note and payment instructions into multiple languages now.

EDIT: Sorry, my mistake. It's already in 28 languages, like the posters below pointed out. I only ever saw the English screenshot and made the incorrect assumption.

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Few people are paying up. The Bitcoin transactions are logged.[1] Current total is US$60K.

[1] https://whitesunset.github.io/wannacrypt_balance/

Wow, I calculated $40k a day ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14339002). It's growing pretty quickly.

taking people a few days to figure out how to buy a bitcoin i guess

That's only a difference of like 65 people. It's just that the ransom is quite high.

That's not really a lot of money compared to the risk he/she is running...

$60K so far, and a lot of people are still probably figuring out how to get Bitcoin. If they had reasonable opsec in making/distributing it and act a bit careful in cashing out the coins they're probably OK. If they end up collecting $200K or so, and Bitcoin continues to go up and they live in a cheap country ... could be well worth it.

They only get to live if the FSB isn't after them.

For some perspective, CryptoWall made over $300mm in it's first year [0] and CryptoLocker made $30mm in 100 days [1].

[0] http://thehackernews.com/2015/10/cryptowall-ransomware.html

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2082204/crime-pays-very-well-...

Why are these orders of magnitude more profitable than WannaCrypt? More computers infected? Bigger percentage of targets paying the ransom? Larger ransom amounts? Something else?

I've read that even after paying you don't get your files back. Might just be buggy software.

It seems they accepted alternate methods of payment aside from BTC, which suggests technical difficulties in acquiring BTC.

People have started taking better backups, now they have the option to restore, plus it's too big, the UK government is never going to pay $300 per computer when you may have 10,000 computers locked up. When you get a small firm with 5 pcs and the cost is $1500 it's a cheap lesson so you pay up.

Isn't the decryption key the same? You pay once and are able to devrypt all the 10k computers?

Why would it be? Usually Ransomware has a unique btc address per infection (per machine) so the decryption key is linked to the payment, that doesn't seem to be the case with this malware.

Maybe 'cause it wasn't a commercial operation, but a "retaliation at a time and place of our own choosing" that spread outside Russia before the killswitch could be hit via their cutout.

It's also not clear how the attackers will be able to launder the Bitcoin, given how many eyes are now on those addresses.

The attackers can run their bitcoins through a "bitcoin mixer". But those mixers may have been penetrated by an intelligence agency. It doesn't matter which one; all the major powers are annoyed with this attacker.

Yeah we can just imagine the scene in a movie: dude lives like a poor hermit for five years, carefully mixing those BTC, and then when he flies to Vietnam and buys a nice boat, drives a few miles offshore, then he finds a pissed-off assassin who kills him in some painful fashion just for "being an asshole for taking so long to surface".

They can easily tumble them using various services and buy Monero with it.

Wait, so does that mean we can follow the money? (find out who converts those specific bitcoins to a physical currency?)

It's hard though, there are money laundering techniques that split the coins into thousands of small packages and tumble the bad coins with good ones.

Now up to $71K.

They did though. See screenshot with the language pulldown: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--mLMZ86w...

According to wikipedia it was translated into 28 languages.

But he did? I think there were 28 RTFs for different languages..

i18n from the get-go, ladies and gents. Don't be this guy, leaving millions on the table.

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