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Comment by omarforgotpwd | Hacker News Reader

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omarforgotpwd

Lol. THis is the programmer equivalent of dumb crooks

1. Sends money to a centralized service that can track his account, must share info with Chinese government

2. Forgot to register domain privately

3. Instead of using DES or RSA, he just XOR’d the file with a key he hard coded in the file

4. He apparently left his name a and phone number in the code?

5. When they looked at what servers it was pinging, they were able to gain access because it had not been properly secured

Am I missing anything else?

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For 1, right now it is still fairly easy to buy "identities" from black market to use with Chinese Internet services. With the so-called "4-piece set" (national ID card, SIM card, debit card linked to a bank account, U-shield (hardware 2FA key for online banking)), one can set up WeChat/Alipay to collect payments without revealing their true identity.

And those "4-piece sets" are not faked ones. People purchase those from slumdogs who woud like some extra cash and don't know or don't care what happens if their identities are used in criminal activities.

But with 2-5... It's possible that those dumb crooks were too dumb to consider that much and just used an WeChat account registered under their own name.

You can buy identities alright, the real challenge is how to cash out the money. The account will likely be locked upon investigation, if not, the moment whoever cash it over the ATM or counter will be arrested on site.

Scammers often hire innocent agent cash out these accounts. But still with very low success rate.

> The account will likely be locked upon investigation

The WeChat account already been banned. http://www.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2018-12/05/c_1123807970.htm

Now it's time for the police to dig out the real criminal.

A proxy/jumper account might work until (as you said) somebody starting to cash the money out.

Seems a very dumb thief, but again, how do somebody steal money online without been caught now days?

use e-tokens like Bitcoin, with a mix service, then convert them to real currency in a random country.

Well, too late to know for that guy, he's already been arrested[0]. Guys on Solidot[1] digged out many interesting things, including one issue he posted on one of he's own GitHub repo saying "Help! How can I delete this repo, I have to run!".

LOL

BUT, I almost feel pity for him. Take look the picture of him on the news[0], look the environment he's living in and how thin he is, pretty rough life I'd say.

I hope hes doing well in prison and become a better man after this. If he can write a virus capable of doing all that, then I think he will also doing well in most companies that does web related works.

[0] https://news.163.com/18/1207/10/E2DS6H800001899O.html

[1] https://www.solidot.org/story?sid=58856

Privacy cryptos like Monero?

Then it will probably be banned in China, so nobody can actually pay the ransom.

Plus, I have read a news article on Wired[0], I don't think Monero is private enough to against state/police launched attacks?

Consider there are many ways to make money legally, doing something at that level of risk maybe just not worth the trouble.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/

so... you just have to mug someone and take the stuff they normally carry around with them? yikes.

That probably doesn't work, since the victim will report the theft and the cards will be cancelled.

What a genius way to get someone you hate thrown into prison!

Just put @omarforgotpwd's name/number/server/doxx into the code and release it really clumsily.

Hmm... What if it was intentional, to frame someone else?

So, person is either just dumb or playing 8 dimensional chess. I know what I think.

I normally come to the same conclusion when I'm thinking about politics.

This isn't 8-dimensions.

For someone who works in this space this would be a simple framing attempt. I give that like one dimension, maybe one and a half. In reality it's probably just a dumb crook or someone doing it for the lulz.

Someone has a bot that scrapes Github for Discord bot tokens and deletes all content in servers it has permissions in and replaces it with info saying X person did it and to "come to his house."

Stuff like that is pretty common I feel for people to use against their enemies. Especially if it was designed to be small and got out of hand.

Or maybe they know it'll look too dumb and thus suspect a framing attempt, so it's 3D class after all.

It could just be a person with some computer knowledge but not really smart enough to do an encrypted attack and if fake ID is as easy as some posters suggest, and they could very quickly and easily with the limited knowledge they had come out with a few thousand dollars then I don't think they were dumb or stupid. It may look stupid given how complex attacks can be these days but so too does the Nigerian Prince email look stupid. But he to this day is still looking for someone to help him with his money.

Also it's entirely possible they purposefully left the files recoverable via XOR instead of DES [1] because all they really care about is getting $16 from you, not punishing you if you don't.

[1] a distinction the author was clearly aware of as it claimed DES was used in the ransom note

I was wondering the same. It’s a pretty genius way to “get revenge” that’s likely to work if so.

You're probably right... but I wouldn't underestimate the power and prevalence of 差不多.

Translation?

I'm guessing "close enough" as in "sloppy work"?

Chabuduo - "near enough is good enough". Said when defending a half-assed solution that barely hangs together. Now that I think about it, I see this in codebases all the time.

MVP?

pretty much

here's more context: https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-a...

more likely some kid who hacked together some ransomware.

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