Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings and Shootings for Hire | Hacker News Reader

Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings and Shootings for Hire

krebsonsecurity.com

144 pointsfeross59 comments

When I read this I was assuming there would be some complex darkweb site used to organize this but nope, they did it on discord and telegram. This almost sounds more like idiots being idiots then any kind of organized threat

Alternatively, organizing crime on discord and telegram is hard enough to detect, monitor, and squash, and provides enough improvement to outcomes and profits, that it's shining a light on how incompetent our law enforcement actually is at policing this kind of organization, and that more sophisticated technologies like Tor and crypto oriented dark net markets aren't strictly necessary.

Telegram I can understand, but discord is a centralized platform that doesn't encrypt your messages. I'm astounded the authorities don't have a direct ability to just search their database at this point.

I'm sure they do, but the shear amount of data surely must make it incredibly difficult to accurately detect.

And worse, being a platform for gamers, the conversation of real world criminals might be very difficult to differentiate from regular gamer talk. Just think how many groups are constantly chatting about GTA V. They're literally talking about the crimes they're committing (in the game world). Discord might actually be the perfect place for criminals to hide their conversations in plain sight.

> I'm sure they do, but the shear amount of data surely must make it incredibly difficult to accurately detect.

Except once you get one person who belong to such a group (by any conventional means) or even have one informant, then you can see where they hang out on discord (and there won't be a million of channels to scan) and now you have access to a nice topology of discord use for organized crime.

How do the people interested in this type of mayhem find it? If it's out in the relative open, it shouldn't be hard to find for someone that is motivated.

There's even a page for this on kym, although not with "GTA V": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-minecraft

Telegram doesn't encrypt any more than Discord: through https. Telegram offers a 1:1 e2e encryption option, but few use it, because it does not propagate to other devices.

Granted I know most criminals are not that smart, and that's how they get caught, but you would think people intending to break the law would use E2E encryption given its availability and half a clue, yeah?

If you've half a clue and understand why E2E is important for communicating about crimes, you wouldn't use Telegram at all.

Thank deity they're not.

Never mind, I had confused telegram and signal.

Tor and crypto are sophisticated but they don't actually provide that much extra protection to criminals - as can be seen by the Silk Road prosecution. All Tor does is change where the weakest link in your opsec is.

Tor provides good traffic obsfucation for both host and clients. I would say it's invaluable to criminals.

Don't worry. We'll have an overzealous AI enforcer that deletes everything you have on the cloud and blocks access to basic human services on a false positive soon enough.

> hard enough to detect, monitor, and squash, and provides enough improvement to outcomes and profits, that it's shining a light on how incompetent our law enforcement actually is at policing this kind of organization

How many police districts use Palantir?

Too many.

Most of them are total morons. Imagine the average genius that sticks up a liquor store, but have them go on random chat rooms asking how they can learn to sim swap.

Why not, drugs are easier to buy on Instagram for the average person. Even though AlphaBay is very easy to access, it's still not that easy. Everyone has an Insta account.

Now, hiding their identities... yeah, some improvements can be made

Yeah back before weed was legal in enough states for me to not feel travel limited Insta was the way to find a plug in a new town.

They’d often sidechat you onto kik or something like that but initial find was on insta.

If I can navigate it the 20 year olds sure can.

I was hoping for something like the crime app from season 3 of Westworld.

Me too

It’s to be expected that we hear more about the idiots who get caught.

Something's still organised enough to be a threat if it works.

While the cases in the article use discord/telegram, it does not mean the dark web does not have this. And I am sure it will have in the future. Ananymous communication and payment tech create a possibility for such market. And the possibility combined with demand will inevitably turn into reality.

It's New Jersey, home of organized criminals who can't make it in New York City.

A lot of organized crime is idiots. Aggressive ones etc, but smarts is not exactly the defining feature.

Smart ones gets into business and commit well hidden frauds rather then violence (which tends to attract attention, eventually).

The ones organized on the dark web probably are those we don't hear about.

Yeah, it’s not “as-a-service”

Do you realize the word "service" has a meaning beyond "web service"?

Also featured in Westworld, the RICO app [0], an Uber for criming.

[0] https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/RICO

"The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed" - William Gibson

Roald Dahl had a similar idea in the 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc.

The plan is simple: Pantaloon is always at the Penguin Club, so they'll show up and ask for him to come out. George will punch him and then escape in the rented 1934 Chevrolet the narrator has waiting.

Hrm ... HN's URL parser is stripping the finial stop, which is part of the actual URL and not sentence punctuation.

Angle brackets ... actually help in this instance:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc.>

... to be clear: I've been adopting bracketed links of late, largely as that's what I'm already doing on Markdown-based sites and documents. This is the first time I've found that it actually confers a practical advantage.

Back in my day you’d just pay the neighborhood troublemaker to slash your ex’s tires. My oh my how times have changed!

In the present day, the target just gets fatally run over.

It won't even make headlines in most cities. And even if the assassin is caught, the "penalty" is a slap in the wrist in most Western cities, and even less in most Eastern cities.

Extremely discrete, plausible deniability, and no one bats an eye.

I don't know what fantasy world you live in but unless you have substantial evidence that the pedestrian did something wrong making the accident reasonably unavoidable by the driver you're in for a many thousands of dollars and a couple court appearances anywhere in the first word. If there's evidence it was intentional then move the decimal to the right once in both cases.

Take your trope and shove it.

i've noticed an uptick recently on hn popular threads with this kind of rhetoric.

very odd. maybe i'm just more cognizant of it and its always been this way

I thought falling out of buildings were easier?

I'm guessing the pay for violence as a service isn't very good, since McGovern-Allen now has a public defender as his lawyer.

Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap

Like so many of today's technical innovations, this is something that has existed for more than a century.

Except now it's "but on the internet!"

What I want to know is what makes a SIM swapper angry enough to do this to his "rival"? Is there some kind of online turf these guys are fighting over? Or is it just personal dislike/escalating online feud over nonsense?

Sadly, people have been killed over parking spaces.

The amount of anger and violence can be wildly out of proportion to the actual offense.

SIM swapping can be hugely profitable, and yeah there are crews fighting over turf. Some insights into the scene and some of the bigger heists explained can be found in this Darknet Diaries episode: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/118/

Humans can be volatile, petty, vengeful, etc over perceived/actual transgression.

For a "classic" read (25 years old!)

Jim Bell's Assassination Politics

https://cryptome.org/ap.htm

At first I thought this was the perpetration of remotely turning devices into bricks by garbling firmware, but apparently, actual bricks and broken windows are involved.

I would not be surprised if the former also becomes commonplace in the future, given how much unfortunate reliance most people have on "smart" devices and Internet communication for their lives.

I was recently derided on hacker news for suggesting that we are quickly coming to a time when people will react to police brutality by crowd sourcing drone strikes on the offending officers.

It will be fascinating to see how law enforcement deals with this.

Nah, going after the police is a death wish for all but the biggest baddies

As enforcement gets more lax (criminal justice reform, progressive prosecutors, etc), victims and their families will start to turn to these tools to buy retribution.

But mercenaries won't go after electeds. Those killers will need to be more bought in, e.g. gang members, cartel militias, etc, with enough power to completely overwhelm govt aligned gangs (like the police)

What does 'life sentence' mean to a terminally ill cancer patient who has been fucked over by the system their entire life and is outraged by the latest instance of unpunished police brutality in their community?

Sooner or later someone is gonna say fuck it and take out a cop on paid leave with a drone. When that starts to happen enough law enforcement will have to make a tough call because maybe their members will be safer in jail after they've committed crimes instead of walking free on the streets.

Thousands of dollars to throw bricks through windows and slash tires?

Anyone who has basic opsec and is willing to cover a decently large area could be rolling in the dough at those prices.

Another reminder that our timeline is following almost every prediction of cyberpunk.

Time to revisit some other predictions of it.

Or maybe we should envision a better future and create some new genres.

I’m increasingly convinced shared narrative direction is deeper than material and organizational constraints in the direction society moves.

Obviously narrative needs to be compatible with material and organizational constraints, but given the overwhelming importance of religion throughout human history in motivating people, I think there’s a lot of compelling evidence that the stories we tell are pretty important.

You can’t force positive visions of the future, but I think we can be a lot more open to them than we are currently.

How many of those services are honeypots?

Probably at least the majority of the discord ones.

Shut this down?

Actually a good thing. This is the gig-economy version of the police.

Nice startup idea for the criminal/illegal scene. Ok, we all know that these activities are illegal and shouldn’t be discussed, but for sure there is a market for such things. I can imagine a VaaS page like a combined eBay/Craigslist format.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com