Cybercrime REvil gang asks for $70M to decrypt systems locked in Kaseya attack
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Besides which, there are plenty of "legitimate" ransomware businesses who would gladly have your legs broken or worse if you threatened their business model. Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's not serious organised crime.
Please leave this sort of thing to law enforcement professionals.
Ransomware operators likely can prove they have keys by decrypting random file/block selected by the victim.
Donate 10,000 USD to UNICEF if you want to recover your data.How much longer do we need to put up with it being the enabler of serious and dangerous cyber crime? Add to that the serious damage it is causing to the environment (I don't want to hear about the 'green energy' nonsense, it's not true and you know it).
It's time to eradicate bitcoin.
These same gangs have extensive infrastructure for stealing millions from US bank accounts, BEC actors are still making more money than ransomware crowd.
If a company really wants to pay, they won’t have a problem bringing suitcases full of cash on a private jet to russia. Especially since most of these payments are not made directly by the victims, but third parties who earn their living by facilitating these payments.
It is hard to get away with suitcases of cash without getting arrested.
It is not. The suitcases just need to be delivered in a friendly country such as Russia. Many of the most prolific ransomware criminals have been identified, but they simply live beyond the reach of Western law enforcement.
> It is possible, but it is much much harder to make 70 mio USD disappear through the regular financial system.
BEC gangs and even regular craigslist scammers manage to do this every day. There’s absurdly extensive infrastructure in the US and abroad to facilitate this.
Gentlemen, get your ransoms ready! the Russian Ransomware Jet arrives next Sunday!
We used to fly a jet per ransom, but it became so unprofitable we pool them now.
Unless of course you want to start building gulags to throw mathematicians in.
Nobody wants to ban computers doing calculations.
Just ban the exchanges:
Revoke licenses for domestic exchanges, and remove foreign exchanges from the SWIFT network.
The government regulates far bigger things on a daily basis.
You will still be able to „do mathematics“ after the ban, so all is well, since it's totally not about speculating, right? ;-)
I do agree with you that it would be effective.. but likely only for a year or two. I mean even before cryptocurrency there was E-Gold.
Shutting down E-Gold just shifted the problem rather than solving it.
Attacking bitcoin specifically as an environmental problem is a valid thought, but there are lots of cryptocurrencies that require no energy so the original problem still persists.
Life finds a way.
Those users are enough to ensure that Bitcoin's value does not plummet to zero, because it has this tremendous utility to them for use in illicit activity. Drug dealing, ransomware, terrorist funding, money laundering; it's 100x easier to funnel money for these activities through bitcoin than using the traditional methods.
> the enabler
I believe this is the source of our disagreement. The enabler is the vulnerability in the infrastructure and the concentration of risk to make a juicy target. If it were impossible to turn this vulnerability into cash--and I disagree that even an effective ban on Bitcoin would accomplish that--it would still exist.
Other actors have non-financial incentives to find and sit on these vulnerabilities. Imagine if the ransomware attacks of the last few months had never happened. Those vulnerabilities would still exist, unknown to the defenders, waiting for discovery by attackers. China might discover them and exploit them all simultaneously with an invasion of Taiwan, for example. That would be worth far more than even a few hundred million dollars, in my estimation.
These attacks hurt in the short term, to be sure, but they are very helpful in the medium to long term, because they force us to actually harden our infrastructure.
We can only assume CBDC's will offer more of the same, unless even more financial tracking is allowed. This comes at a cost of global financial privacy.
The real problem is the Bitcoin <-> Fiat exchange. Eradicate the exchanges, that will return Bitcoin to its roots, where it was supposed to replace cash, not transfer it. You want Bitcoin? You don't buy them with USDs, but provide some product/service and accept Bitcoin as payment.
Yes, criminals will get increasingly creative, starting a game of cat and mouse, but in the end it will be too much effort compared to traditional cash bags and money laundering.
Bonus: the value of BitCoin would be unlinked from the value of USD, it would become a parallel economy.
It is possible to use a unique key for each client and one key that decrypts them all [1]
I wonder if they did, or if they made a mistake and only used one key. They would have to be more professional than that I guess.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/597188/encryption-decryp...
If they used this implementation then each clients data has a unique symmetric key encrypting it and attached to their data is that symmetric key encrypted in multiple instances using different keys. One key Revil uses everywhere and another unique key for each client. So Revil can hand over a global key or personal key to recover the original symmetric key which is then used to decrypt the data.
There are news all the time of big companies making rookie mistakes of that magnitude. I don't see why it should be different for big companies of the organized-crime variant.
They encrypt the data using 100,000 keys in 100,000 parts. You pay 1/100,000 the ransom and pick a key. You test. You get a random 1/100,000 of your data back. Repeat.
There would be better ways I'm sure.
The power of smart contracts is very limited. The hype around them is based on a lot of lie, from the people that are not very different from those criminal hackers.
Can you recommend any further readin on this?
That's all. Yes, you can use it to write crypto-kitties or some fair casinos (although it's very hard, since you have to implement fair unpredictable randomness). You can use your imagination to write some other interesting stuff.
But you can't rebuild the entire financial system based on that. Here I commented about some specific problems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27651377
There's one way to end this for US businesses: criminalize paying ransomware ransoms, and end the ability to convert fiat to crypto.
Kill the fiat gateways, kill the scammers.
Would be enough with just the first, and the second wouldn't even do anything, I don't think ransomware people are interested in converting fiat to cryptocurrencies, they are interested in the reverse. But criminalizing would A) legitimize cryptocurrency and probably B) build more hype around it.
Use existing laws and tools for stopping existing breakage of those laws, makes sense. Come up with new bans that affect more than the action you want to affect, not much sense.
Fake a few high profile ransomware attacks in their name.
Make the companies complain loudly that they „paid“ you but you didn't provide the keys and they had to recover the data manually.
What are they gonna do, sue you? :-)
Won't you run into the problem of them being able to say "look, that's not on our list of keypairs, nor is it a keypair we've ever used; it ain't us" and being somewhat believed?
Edit: Wikipedia says: "Recorded Future is a privately held cybersecurity company founded in 2009 with headquarters in Somerville, Massachusetts. The company specializes in the collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of threat intelligence."
OK, a company that's been around 12 years is I guess legitimate.
2018: Morgan doctine "cyber privateering"
2021: Geek Squad offers MSP?
$70m is just the "buy it now" price.