'Operation Endgame' Hits Malware Delivery Platforms
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
Is the "Think about your next move" messaging that intimidating to hackers, especially those living in non-US-aligned countries?
I suspect this flood of weirdly cyberpunk imagery (seriously, mugshots with a Matrix background?) is more of an artistic choice to flatter the egos of the task force's agents than a strategic move. White hat hackers probably like pretending they're in a spy movie as much as black hats do.
There are some perks to being a government employee, but you end up in the government framework for pay and what not, which sucks. if I recall correctly the folks at CIA (AFD I believe???) had some sort of system set up where they hired government employees as a POCO billet or something so they could bring talent in at a reasonable pay scale, and then they'd do some political maneuvering to rotate people around so everyone was getting paid. DIA was a charlie foxtrot in that arena and probably still is, so I'd avoid them. The FBI has a pretty good team in quantico, though I'm guessing again that most of the are really just Booz employees.
The latter tend to be quite good.
It used to be that duty went both ways, this is not in fashion anymore.
And yeah, it doesn't work for everyone, and some people genuinely interested in doing the good thing can turn sour after a while. But I rarely see people romanticizing the work conditions or the system they are in.
Also having people willing to trade a pay cut for a way to "make good things" leads to people using their agency in surprising ways, sometimes fucked up.
> an organization that has lost its integrity long ago
That's every org. The relevant part isn't org structure or integrity but whether the org has an impact on stuff that actually matters. Not everyone is interested in optimizing the click rate of ads.
that's basically it in a nutshell. the corpo world is all about enshittification, and aren't making things better.
it's debatable if the DIA is, either, but there is at least something to stand for other than greed, or some thought terminating cliché about how the "invisible hand" will somehow fix things.
People in that state tend to make mistakes more often.
By way of the example about the LockBit leader: you’re that guy and the feds put up a site saying they know who you are and in 2 days they’re announcing your identity to the public - what do you do? You’re an associate of that guy - what do you do?
The feds are basically whacking the side of the box to see what happens - when the status quo isn’t working, inject some chaos and see what you get.
Don't know in practice for everyone, but people still like to travel. And the US doesn't forget. Do you remember Marcus Hutchins coming for the conference?
Once the details are out, they can potentially grab you through other friendly countries too.
Assuming these folks are somewhere lawless, I assume this is meant to let third parties take matters into their own hands?
https://icdt.osu.edu/crack99-takedown-100-million-chinese-so...
https://www.amazon.com/CRACK99-Takedown-Million-Chinese-Soft...
got my attention though, will check it out
>”A “wanted” poster including the names and photos of eight suspects wanted by Germany and now on Europol’s “Most Wanted” list.”
4 people in the initial arrests. They already have arrest warrants for at least another 8.
It seems they have arrested someone who provided a lot of infrastructure so it wouldn't surprise me if they were able to roll that into more arrests in the near future.
>“It has been discovered through the investigations so far that one of the main suspects has earned at least EUR 69 million in cryptocurrency by renting out criminal infrastructure sites to deploy ransomware,”
I swear law enforcement and the military choose the cringest name codes, not much better than names kids would pick.
Thus nothing risky, edgy or creative makes it out of such meetings.
I have it on good authority that the people in law enforcement and the military — and indeed all humans in general — were in fact kids at one point. Maybe we all just like cool sounding codenames, even if some keyboard jockeys on a forum will call it “cringe”.
Why? That name’s dope. If you can’t give cool names to military operations of all things, then you can’t give cool names to anything. And as someone else pointed out, the US military does have a framework for how they name operations.
They at least avoid sounding like our names in the software industry: https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ
:P
The patch for "Operation Endgame" (in the screen cap at the top of the article) even shows chess pieces, not superheroes.
Ever seen those "million dollar drug busts" that have a small pile of drugs on the table?
Assuming those are all master-control servers, how many would it take to make a significant difference?
They're still monitoring and investigating transactions, so it seems likely the numbers will grow.
I presume the counterargument is that it's like someone took down Gmail or some other centralized service or something. Maybe the disrupted centralization will send a lot of operations scrambling, even if it was only a few hundred servers that were doing all the work.
That would be a radical departure from the status quo of boasting loudly and plastering seizure pages up everywhere, and the suggestion here is that they are trying different things.