Hacker News Reader

Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

I should have stayed in the trenches in the 2000s and waited until Satoshi releases Bitcoin which makes all of this possible. But I didn’t.

A lot of what was happening back then compared to today is just such a stark difference. The kind of attack vectors I was chasing myself are now so obsolete that most of these gangs will just give you that info for free… I mean holy shit… you can just load up Tor and go download terabytes of information in any industry imaginable. Free of charge. No need to spend endless weeks or months planning out the perfect attack (although that process is rewarding in its own way) …

This year has been huge for ransomware attacks, how long until one of the major FAANG companies get toppled over?

View on HN

If they were, how much do you think they'd pay for it to not leak to the public? (which is illegal, but that doesn't stop corporations from acting that way). If, say, Netflix got hacked (not ransomware, but user+credit card db dumped) but they paid to hush it up, how would we know? If the thieves were smart, they wouldn't use all of that dump simultaneously, so it couldn't be correlated.

For sure. I mean who knows how many big corps have been owned that we don’t know about. I suppose if you dump something like Gmail users, hypothetically, then there is no way Google wouldn’t cough up the money.

But by the looks of it a lot of these groups are after specific targets, for example - chipmakers. No way they want their secrets out in the public so they’ll happily pay up, especially if they are from places outside of the US.

I sometimes see on my Twitter feed, alerts of big Bitcoin transactions that are never disclosed publicly but are associated with well known laundering networks.

I highly doubt Google would pay. There is a 0% chance they prevent the public (and government) from finding out the attack took place, and there is no way to guarantee the attackers actually delete the data. It is lose-lose for them because of the reputation effects. Unlike the casino or other industries where people don't expect them to be cybersecurity experts nor care to change their behavior anyway.

I've found it darn near impossible to successfully download any large dump via Tor because of the low bandwidth and interruptions.

Unlikely. Startups are way easier to attack than big tech.

Big tech has a significantly larger and more lucrative attack surface. Do not mistake size for competency.

> load up Tor and go download terabytes of information in any industry imaginable

How do you find any of it?

I don’t want to endorse this practice at all but because it is public knowledge,

https://ransomwatch.telemetry.ltd/#/recentposts

I trust you will be able to figure out the rest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com