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Comment by leftcenterright | Hacker News Reader

> To put it another way, if this data had value, the ransomware group wouldn't be leaking it for free.

This is entirely incorrect and just speculation.

Most likely reason for not paying up is that law enforcement (involved in this case as well) does not like it and have even been considering a ban on ransom payments. This in no way implies this data has no value, it is very probable this data contains credentials (Citrix appliances) and might allow future compromises unless Boeing improves their security posture.

- https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/a-huge-hoard-of-boein...

- https://hbr.org/2023/08/how-a-federal-ban-on-ransomware-paym...

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The very best reason not to pay ransoms is because it requires trusting the piece of garbage that stole from you, to be honest.

Never pay the ransom...ever.

Agreed.

Paying the ransom only funds the operation, prompting growth and incentives

And in a majority of cases I've read about, no or little data is recovered.

By demanding a ransom, they've already notified the customer that the credentials have been stolen. The value doesn't lie in releasing them.

If they wanted to be paid to steal credentials they should have gotten hired as a red team.

> ... just speculation.

The formulation (3rd conditional) makes it clear the author is aware they're speculating.

> This [the dump is worthless] is entirely incorrect

Which isn't telling us why (the dump is valuable). You say that there's a legal ban on ransom, so the ban supposedly reduces market value. Black market participants evade bans, there is a black market value which clearly is the prime market for such loot. You write "it is very probable this data contains credentials" which is plausible, but the article you linked mentions logs and configs, not credentials. Maybe (before you point it out: that is also speculation) there were no credentials in the first place (dump was of low-value), or the hackers filtered them out for later use (seller filleted the fish), either way the resulting merchandise is of low value.

> The formulation (3rd conditional) makes it clear the author is aware they're speculating.

If the author had meant to convey speculation, their sentence would have included a modal verb or expression for speculation.

> You say that there's a legal ban

That’s a significant semantic shift from “have even been considering a ban“.

but, could you just imagine having to filter through 45 GB of emails! to try to find any value in that at all, might be expensive, even if you try to automate it.

firms this size may have plugins to mark the mails before sending them out. E.g. internal, external, sensitive labels and what not. Could make it easier to traverse.

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