Cryptocurrency Gave Birth to the Ransomware Epidemic | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency Gave Birth to the Ransomware Epidemic

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41 pointspseudolus14 comments

What would a reality look like in which cryptocurrency did not exist to create the financial incentive for these attacks? Assuming the same lack of security exploited by ransomware also exists in this reality, how would the attacks differ? Would the attacks be less common or cease to exist because the financial motivation to do so no longer exists? In which case, wouldn’t that indirectly prolong the existence of insecure and exploitable systems?

Personally, I think there will be a long-term positive change in the tech world as a result of the recent rise in ransomeware. I think it has forced companies to reevaluate their security practices in an unprecedentedly serious way.

I think cryptocurrency made ransomware more rampant, because of the ease of payment. Without cryptocurrency, ransoms would probably be MUCH higher. Folks would be standing in line at western union to pay their ransoms, and the threat actors would have less assurance their ransoms would arrive.

Lol what.

Now everybody from small businesses to hospitals has to defend themselves against untouchable criminals armed by by military technology exploiting zero days in code they can't patch (let alone understand).

What we're seeing is that even the supposedly best equiped and most interested parties: chip companies, crypto markets, hospitals are getting pwned.

Hospitals likely have some of the worst IT environments around, its unsurprising. When it's a choice between IT and more doctors, hospitals are likely to choose more doctors.

Nobodies throwing zero days against Dave and Susan's Toy Store, it's just not economically feasible.

I watched this on YT last night. Runa is awesome and gets it as always. She rocks. Yes, it is like Tor in that there is good with the bad, and public opinion on positive strengths can counter FUD narratives.

Joseph reports accurately and matter of fact. LFB is just raising negative opinion. It’s a shame because at one point I thought LFB was a real advocate. He seems disillusioned.

Tor and cryptocurrency are completely different things; one is about freedom of expression and communication; the other is about removing what little accountability and transparency exists in the world financial system. Sure, people should be able to move small amounts of money anonymously, but the amount of power financial insitutions have by virtue of their ability to move trillions of dollars around means that at the very least there should be a right for the public to see how those affairs are conducted.

No! Both are about shifting the balance of power from the state to the individual. Cryptography and Cryptocurrency are evolutions in a continuum of technologies that empower the individual for privacy and security. They are technologies that care not for the existing power structures — they exist and the power structures better get used to and work with their existence. Software doesn’t care what you want. It just is.

That's a beautiful thought, but in reality cryptocurrency is either a wild west, or controlled by a few companies. There is no trust in the cryptocurrency system. A currency needs to be backed by trust in something to be a viable means of payment.

Ahh! We don’t need trust, that’s the whole point and the great innovation.

Cryptography works because it allows two parties to communicate without needing to trust the network not to eavesdrop or modify traffic.

Cryptocurrency works because it allows two parties to exchange value without trusting each other, or the network processing the transactions.

Trust is a weakness. If we can build zero-trust systems we can avoid entire classes of problems.

You're misunderstanding me. I'm not just talking about there not relying on a trusted party.

I'm talking about trust in the system; trust that the system will be stable; trust that assets will keep their value; trust that I or the system won't be hacked

But even then, the absence of trusted parties still seems like a abstract fantasy in reality. It seems as if most people who own cryptocurrency still do it through a trusted party — a coin exchange.

Thank you for responding! No I think I do understand, this isn’t just TTP. It’s about trustless interaction between peers all mutually agreeing on a universe view. Mostly exchanging money, for goods and services, one of the oldest human endeavors.

Our abstractions in life all require some degrees of trust and trust delegation so it is a difficult concept to grasp in a pure computation/storage domain.

CEXs (centralized exchanges) are a trusted party, however they are not part of the protocol anymore than any other peer. Email being a decentralized protocol is analogous. The spec doesn’t care if most use big providers.

What is trust? A belief or a delegation of belief to another party or system holding a particular universe view. That view that cannot be proven by rigorous or universal concepts like A < B.

When commerce can occur without requiring ‘trust of the money’, we have removed a major vulnerability in which parties can manipulate the universe view. So much of the time and energy spent on protecting paper (a universe view) just doesn’t need to be spent.

I get that the value is volatile relative to fiat systems. But we are in a transitionary period and the true value to humanity at last is only just starting to dawn on people. Stop thinking in “Bitcoin”, and start thinking about how you can add value through goods and services and how many sats you will charge.

Kidnapping for ransom did not exist before money was invented.

Marcus Hutchins: Why Destroying Bitcoin Wouldn't Stop Corporate Ransomware:

https://youtu.be/LDIGJRd_PyE

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