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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Ransomware obviously only works if people are paying. Just stop that and it will go away.

Oh, and of course make sure it can't happen in the beginning.

That's victim blaming. Even if we don't pay up, people will still spread ransomware just for shits and giggles. The cat is out of the bag.

“That’s victim blaming”

And?

In this case the victims are enabling a whole cottage industry of crime.

Ransomware won't stop even if you don't pay up. Just destroying the target by data loss can be a sufficient reason for any attacker. No payment needed.

This is wildly incorrect. For criminal groups who intend on making money, that payment is needed on a certain subset of victims are they can’t stay in business.

I am a shady company who wants to take down a competitor. I can hire a hacker who'll do the dirty job for me and then get paid in cold hard cash. Or a nation state actor can decide to attack an enemy country's infrastructure.

So? If their goal is destruction what does that have to do with ransomware? They can do that whether paying the ransom is legal or not.

Deception? It can confuse the target about the motives of the attack.

So they were going to destroy data anyway, so this isn’t what outlawing ransom payments is meant prevent because it can’t. It will prevent ransomware for profit if no one pays.

He’s not blaming the victims for getting attacked by ransomware. He’s blaming people who then pay the attackers. That’s a separate issue. People can be both victims and perpetrators of separate offenses, subject to criticism. I.e. being a victim of one thing does not render you blamless for all your subsequent actions.

Those who pay the attackers might have no other choice. Sure they should have taken backups. But right now they don't have any. What else can they do? Maybe government can enact laws asking to maintain backups regularly in critical industries.

> What else can they do?

They can take the hit and live without their data, thereby making the world safer for the rest of us. Focusing only on their own personal problem is the definition of selfishness.

Would you let your company that earns millions for a ransomware that is asking tens of thousands of dollars?

If your company that owns millions doesn't have a backup of the mission-critical data somewhere, you have a bigger problem.

No. In that moment your biggest problem is that all your data is inaccessible. That you don’t have backups reduces options since it precludes that solution, but another one exists: pay the ransom.

Continuity is part of regulation in some industries, yes

> Maybe government can enact laws asking to maintain backups regularly in critical industries.

That's a step in the right direction, but we need more.

If you're critial industry and get ransomwared there should be hefty fines for everyone involved from the top down.

Also there should be hefty fines for any data leaks that are a result of ransomware attacks.

Companies will start moving when getting ransomwared due to low security standards is a major impact on your financials and not like some "put 50k aside for data hostage situations".

Could you try to cure cancer next?

It's unnecessary. You just have to make sure to not develop it first.

Even when it shuts down hospital ERs?

https://www.wired.com/story/universal-health-services-ransom...

Very brave of you to risk other people's health.

Thanks I'm cured.

I don't get why they don't just restore from backup. S3 has been around for more than a decade at this point.

ha! That is brilliant idea, how come nobody ever though of it before?

I don't know. Seems to be easier (read "cheaper") to run shitty software and not train people well, so this doesn't happen in the first place.

It's not like Ransomware is some god-given thing that just happens.

There's a case in Germany right now where the critical Confluence bug was simply not patched for two weeks after the notice that there's a critical bug/exploit. Now the systems are down and everybody's wondering how that could probably have happened...

"Won't happen here" is easier than taking care.

'If you dont pay it will die off'

'If you have prepared staff and software you are not going to be affected'

All of it is true, no discussion here.

But that's not how real world works. Complex systems, large staff of various skills, temporary access for temporary fix that becomes an established feature because there is something else more important, people leaving and so on.

That's how a <insert boring item> company ends up with their DB not backed up or backed up locally so that's encrypted in the attack too.

And you need info on orders, deliveries, and money etc RIGHT NOW!

What do you do?

You can't protect against the 80 year old Marthas who IS GOING to click the link regarding her 10,000,000$ payment from the Nigerian prince. She IS GOING to download and install the bank transfer program, and she is going to compromise the entire network.

You can't get rid of the Marthas because the Marthas have been here 30 years and hangs out with everyone from the company on weekends, and probably knows more about the business than anyone even if you wanted to get rid of her.

Worse, it's not just ancient Marthas. A high percentage of younger generations—including those who grew up with desktop computers, so you can't just say "oh it's the iPhone's fault"—use computers essentially by rote and habit, without a conceptual understanding of much of it, and I don't mean in a theoretical CS-type sense, but more like plugging in a USB drive and knowing one specific place on one specific kind of window, reached by clicking one particular icon to find it in, and being totally lost if it's not there and/or concerned or confused if it's got a different name than the totally different USB drive you used last week, versus having some sense of what happens when you connect a disk and the sort of place you might be able to find it. It's the difference between "I get there by clicking this, then that" and "I get there by opening my file manager and navigating to what I need". They're saying the same thing, but one implies some understanding, and a resultant resilience and flexibility in use of the computer.

The former are following a script with most everything they do, while the latter have enough understanding to think in categories of behavior and to predict or explain things, at least a little, which doesn't make them immune to phishing, but does make them significantly harder targets. The latter sort are less common than one might hope, even among those younger than Martha, though, which becomes clear if you talk to people who work in non-technical offices—bearing in mind that all but the oldest workers are now mostly Gen X and Millennials, with only a few raised-on-phones Gen Z so far.

Overall, I'd say all signs point to every general-purpose desktop operating system being a usability and security disaster for at least half the population of non-oldsters.

genius!

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