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Comment by magnusss | Hacker News Reader

The reason that cyberattacks are proliferating is because it has only recently become easy for the threat actors to receive massive payments quickly and anonymously. Remove that ability and the entire cyberattack ecosystem shuts down instantly. It is only a matter of time before this happens.

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The reason cyberattacks are proliferating is because many enterprises refuse to learn from the mistakes of others. They continue to connect ancient, unpatched Windows and Exchange servers to the public internet, they don't segment their networks, they don't secure TeamViewer and RDP, they don't use FIDO U2F, they don't have an IDS, they don't monitor logs, they don't execute email links and attachments in a sandbox, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, but this is not new. Cryptocurrency is.

Also blaming the victim can only go so far

My guess is that there are many factors.

- More infrastructure than ever has some exposure to the internet - Outsourcing at massive scale (probably) makes consistent security screening harder - There are more programmers in the world than ever and so (probably) there are more black hats, malicious hackers, etc - As time goes on, there are more and more aging computer systems, thus (probably) there are more and more vulnerabilities in the wild - As time goes on, systems accrete complexity, thus (probably) there are more and more vulnerabilities in the wild

But yes, I do think cryptocurrency is an important change. Cash is still king when it comes to crime, but crypto does make crossing borders much easier.

The whole thing is very asymmetric:

Your own jurisdiction and law enforcement have no power on foreign territory; but foreign organizations (state sponsored or not) located there have freedom to penetrate your society and economy. Moreover, foreign governments may deliberately ignore your requests to investigate.

Thanks to technologies and to chaotic reactions to modern day problems (including covid-19 pandemic) it looks like modern forms of independent sovereign states are very archaic.

If you write the combination for your safe on a post-it note and stick it to the door of the safe, and a thief opens the safe and steals everything in it, it's still the thief's fault.

But it's not victim-blaming to observe that you shouldn't have made it so easy for the thief.

If it's just your valuables that get stolen, then that's unfortunate for you, but at least it doesn't hurt anyone else.

But when other people trust you to keep the safe secure, and are hurt because of your negligence, then it's also not victim-blaming to observe that your negligence caused harm to other people.

Meanwhile Microsoft and "app" developers are training normal users to avoid updates by continuing to push anti-user updates...

BTC will increasingly become viewed as playing a significant role in these incidents. Legislation antithetical to crypto currencies should be expected with bi-partisan support. I would imagine fairly soon.

This is why “it’s just like cash but better, and humanity has been using cash for centuries” is not a valid argument for adoption of cryptocurrencies. Cash has fundamental scale-limiting properties; cash without those properties is a qualitatively different beast for which there’s no precedent in humanity’s history. The above argument actively conceals the sheer scope of unknown unknowns.

Cat is out of the bag I think.

Even if you shut down the cashing out infrastructure (exchanges) in the affected countries, it will quickly spring up again in countries belligerent to them. The FATF is the main global body trying to curb this, but my hunch is they will lose this battle long-term.

Imagine if you are on the FATF red list [1] and you announce a free-for all domestic exchange for local spending. It's free FDI.

[1] http://www.fatf-gafi.org/countries/#high-risk

This would be terrible in the long term because without ransomware companies regularly carrying out such attacks, vulnerabilities would remain unaddressed until a rival nation decides to use them. Much better to have one pipedown temporarily shut down now than for China or Russia to shut them all down at once sometime in future.

I assume you're thinking of blockchain tech? How do you think the genie will be put back in the bottle?

BTC has value because people exchange it for "real" money. If BTC is heavily regulated or outlawed, a whole lot of folks are going to duck out. It's one thing to try and get in on the ground floor of the latest meme stock, it's another thing to buy into a currency/practice that's illegal in your country.

Add onto that making it illegal to pay ransoms in BTC, then there's really no value in using it as a ransomeware currency. No one is buying it so all you are getting are some random digits on a piece of paper.

The US and other government wills outlaw all cryptocurrencies but the ones that they control (“Govcoin,” as The Economist refers to them). Game over.

You're assuming the US and other government are not using cryptocurrencies for their own covert transactions.

So what? Many governments have nuclear weapons arsenals but they don't make it legal for everyone to buy or manufacture atomic bombs.

I would expect that the drug production and export business is a more apt analogy.

>The US and other government wills outlaw all cryptocurrencies but the ones that they control (“Govcoin,” as The Economist refers to them). Game over.

Just like how outlawing drugs ended the drug trade.

Outlawing a thing except for when the govt controls it is just another way of saying governement regulation. Which is both common and successful.

When was the last time you drank bootleg liquor? Answer: I don't know of course, but for most people in rich western countries I would think the answer is never.

It's a good point but that's a particularly bad analogy. Brewing and distilling are strongly culturally ingrained, at least in the west. I live in a state where (last I checked) no legal method exists to distill ethanol for personal use. Nonetheless, a surprising number of acquaintances over the years have had stills and offered me samples.

Do you think your local circumstances are broadly generalisable? I would be surprised.

In the US, honestly, yes. I've had the same experience in two different states at this point and friends who relocated from other places have reported similar. I mean, you can literally order a small still that you use on your stove top from Amazon!

I think it just depends on the sort of people you choose to spend time with.

Well mark me down as dubious but not invested enough to research it. However, I do wonder if you/they test or filter for poisonous impurities like methanol? Seems like a bit of a risk?

Testing and filtering is accomplished by the distillation itself. A very basic understanding of what comes out when is more than enough for a simple pot still and only one or two passes. Humans have been doing that since long before the concept of a molecule even existed.

If you decide to mess around with a large fractionating column though, do read up and make sure you have a full conceptual understanding of how the chemistry works. Even seemingly benign chemicals can be extremely dangerous to ingest or handle once concentrated. (For example, vinegar. Dilute acetic acid makes for a good salad dressing. Above 90%, contact will leave you with severe burns and scarring.)

How so? The US has banned heroin, cocaine etc but it never provided a state-sanctioned alternative.

Blockchain has many uses, including as a record of transaction. Crypto currencies are merely a subset of what might be available using blockchain. Legislation can certainly target that subset.

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