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Comment by 1023bytes | Hacker News Reader

Some other info: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/03/git_ransomware_bitc...

Out of all things to hold for ransom git repos seem like a bad idea. Most of the time there are multiple clones lying around anyways. I agree that having the source code leak can be bad news, but the code itself being secret should not be a critical part of the business.

So you’re telling me that if, say, Google’s Search algorithm got leaked it wouldn’t seriously hinder their business? There’s definitely cases where leaking a business’ code can be pretty disastrous.

> So you’re telling me that if, say, Google’s Search algorithm got leaked

Google's search algorithm was public for a long time [0], it's been improved now and more under the curtains, but the answer is no.

Google wins not only by technology, but also by size of the index

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

I believe Google has also bolted enough ML to search that they couldn't really recreate current search with just code.

Also the code base is probably so big and esoteric that there is no way to replicate the services without knowledge external to the repo.

You can get bits and parts and it would be disastrous for Google, but you would need 1000 engineers to reverse engineer the source code into some working search engine or what ever service you would want to replicate.

I've been thinking about what if the competitors got hold of my employers code base. I think it would require years of reverse engineering to get anything useful out of it for their product, and that they could just as well put that effort into their product directly without espionage.

Probably not, but I suspect some people will still pay the ransom anyway. Keep in mind, many people also do keep "secrets" used for other authenticating to other services in their git repos - even though it's a terrible idea.

These secrets are now compromised anyway.

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