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Comment by runciblespoon | Hacker News Reader

> I'm on the bank's side of the lawsuit based on what I read in this article

Did you read this bit:

‘The second exclusion in the C&E rider negates coverage for “loss involving automated mechanical devices which, on behalf of the Insured, disburse Money, accept deposits, cash checks, drafts or similar Written instruments or make credit card loans . . ..”‘’

And never lose the opportunity to blame 'Russian' hackers.

“Foregenix .. determined the hacking tools and activity appeared to come from Russian-based Internet addresses .. according to the bank Verizon’s forensics experts concluded that the tools and servers used by the hackers were of Russian origin”

They're clever enough to hack a bank but not clever enough to disguise their IP address.

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Why would the Russian's care if their address was known? They aren't going to be extradited or punished by the Russian government, they may be funded by the government or people very well connected to the government. Not to make it political, but they hacked many of our election systems and didn't even get punished for that.

I love the casual potential blaming of Russian state actors for corporate cyber attacks, but complete disbelief when NSA is accused/implicated in the exact same...

Complete disbelief? I thought it was common knowledge that the NSA spies on everyone and has spies working or intercepting shipments from most of the major tech manufacturers in the world.

The NSA's typical practices aren't generally thought to include encouraging domestic criminal groups to steal sizable quantities of money from foreign banks. Or sitting idly by as it happens on a regular basis.

We expect the NSA to be compromising foreign systems. We don't expect them to be doing this with them.

I'm pretty sure the NSA isn't hacking banks to steal a few million dollars, considering their budget.

That rider sounds to me like the ATM itself has to be compromised. It wasn't. The hack was upstream and the ATM was just doing what the network rules told it to.

No, it just says that the ATM must be involved in the loss, they need to be the cause or the source of the loss. And I think it is pretty well arguable that ATMs were involved in this case, even if in relatively minor role.

Yeah it makes it seem a bit implausible or at least should be cause for just a teeny weeny second of consideration. If I were hacking into a bank I'd consider myself pretty smart if I thought to pin it on the most boringly believable (by most Americans, stewed as they are in a soup of anti-Russia talk) hacking culprit.

Or they disguised the IP addresses to look like Russian IPs? Although I'm no hacker- anyone know hard that would be to do?

If you're going to build a botnet, it'll probably mainly be a bunch of Russian and Chinese machines. They've got the most WinXP instances still running without hardly any updates.

Easy enough by using a VPN and/or compromised Russian machines.

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