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Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

It's like a law that makes it illegal to get raped. Many countries exist where that's actually how they deal with it. Reported rape does indeed drop. Emphasis on "reported".

The fundamental problem is that you put blame on the victim and force them to "try harder". Trying harder in this case, against literally anyone in the world discovering one flaw in their system (and systems are never flawless).

A more successful approach would be eliminating the ability for anyone in the world to extort money anonymously from companies. Because without the motivation, the blackmailers have no reason to blackmail you.

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"A more successful approach would be eliminating the ability for anyone in the world to extort money anonymously from companies. Because without the motivation, the blackmailers have no reason to blackmail you. "

While I agree in principal, that is quite a lofty goal. What are some of the ways you would suggest eliminating that ability?

Ban cryptocurrency in the US. The crypto market would immediately tank. Other western companies would likely follow suit. US sanctions can be issued against exchanges, if desired. Obviously cryptocurrency could still continue in this scenario, but transferring money from USD to crypto would be much more difficult. And the value of coins would be so low and probably continuing to fall that it wouldn’t be as appealing a means of ransom.

That's not apples to apples, necessarily.

Ransom requires a response to incentivize further crime. You don't get paid, it's not an option.

Unless you don't need the funds, and it's used to terrorize desirable targets. Then you have a much better case.

So the question is, which are we facing?

Ship 2 pounds of gold to a county that will happily accept bribes to not care and then we'll email you the keys to decrypt your network, otherwise we'll sell the data.

If that were the outcome of said legislation, it would make the barrier to entry for executing a ransomware attack much, much higher than it is today. Wouldn’t that be a successful outcome?

I don't think the barrier to entry is higher. You're just asking for them to send something physical, you don't have to do any extra work. I'm making an assumption that a lot of the current problems with ransomware originate from criminal gangs in countries that already look the other way. Maybe that is a poor assumption. A company could be less likely to mail cash instead of clicking a button though.

The barrier to entry is higher because the criminals need to be set up to anonymously receive an international shipment of physical currency/commodity. Apart from overcoming the logistical complexity of sending such a package (e.g. customs), the criminals would have to bribe the right officials to anonymize their physical address, which while not impossible is definitely a much higher barrier to entry than asking for cryptocurrency to be sent to some crypto wallet address, which any script kiddie can do.

> A more successful approach would be eliminating the ability for anyone in the world to extort money anonymously from companies. Because without the motivation, the blackmailers have no reason to blackmail you.

In other words: attempting to ban cryptocurrencies?

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