Hacker News Reader

Comment by clwg | Hacker News Reader

I've worked on several high-profile botnet takedowns that have resulted in arrests. There is a very fine line and a slippery slope that you absolutely need to stay on the right side of, or things can become very invasive and unethical[0].

Online scams, fraud, and malware have been around since the '80s, and we've survived.

Additionally, a huge industry has been built around it, employing many people and generating massive amounts of wealth compared to the direct costs of these activities. Just compare the cost of ransomware to the "cost of cybercrime"[1][2] which is mostly revenue for the cybersecurity industry, and there is a magnitude of difference.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj454d/private-intelligence-...

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-pa...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/01/cybersecurity-cybercr...

View on HN

> Online scams, fraud, and malware have been around since the '80s, and we've survived.

That's a really awful take. We've also had plagues killing large chunk of population and we've survived. That doesn't mean it wasn't an issue for people affected. There are people who have lost their life savings and relationships due to scams. There's an individual/society cost to all of this.

That's a bit of a unfair comparison.

In the context I was discussing I consider it a pragmatic take because our response to these issues needs to be understood across multiple domains including privacy.

That's not to say that nothing should be done. Personally, I'd like to see measured legislation placing more security, privacy and liability onto manufacturers and providers.

You consider total ransomware payments the "cost of ransomware"?

And the revenue of the cybersecurity industry the "cost of cybercrime"?

You seem competent, me I don't know much about practical cybersecurity.

But the combined cost of companies or medical facilities being infected by ransomware surely is not covered by the total ransom payments, right?

Sorry if I'n grossly misunderstanding your take, but I struggle to make sense of it.

I see however your point about surveillance.

And also, affected companies and institutions + the software companies, consultants etc they work with should carry a certain responsibility in some cases.

For example, a social engineering breach with one employee who had normal privileges shouldn't allow to easily propagate over the whole network etc

The true cost of any of this is very hard to quantify. There are reputational costs (though you generally want to buy the dip after a hack), national security concerns, intellectual property theft, etc. So, it is a weak argument in that regard, but that's only because there's not a lot of good data to even form a solid opinion on. Sorry if my comment seemed a bit ambiguous.

Personally, I have seen during incident response many organizations drop seven figures on EDR, IDS/IPS, and a bunch of widgets while ignoring or refusing to do simple things like network segmentation and configuration/patch management, and it's because they've been sold silver bullets by their vendors, so I also hold a bit of contempt for the industry as well.

Yeah, I was also thinking about hospitals and other crucial infrastructure where ransomware attacks have even cost lives.

I got your point though, that's why I edited in the paragraph about accountability.

Thanks for your insights.

>network segmentation

This gives me flashbacks. I worked in hospital IT for a few years, and the main IT office was constantly trying to fold the (unpatchable, running a mix of OS2, win95, win98, MSdos, and proprietary OSs in -2007) medical devices into the main, internet accessible network.

I had to spend countless hours in meetings to keep them segregated. At times, I actually had to just pull fiber jumpers out of the switch. They’d eventually have a fit because they couldn’t see the medical devices with their threat scanning software.

They could have just hooked up a laptop to the medical device network and said “yep, every single ip address on there is vulnerable” and sent a strongly worded letter to each manufacturer demanding a patch, which will never be released. Since the devices are FDA certified medical devices, you can’t just patch them without manufacturer endorsement of the software change…so any device more than a few years old is usually vulnerable.

3 months after I left they had a major ransomware event. Weird. Who could have imagined?

Law enforcement industry partnerships weird me out a little bit too. Cases like this are maybe a little more innocent: https://www.wired.com/story/big-pipes-ddos-for-hire-fbi/. But then you have Spamhaus compiling literal dossiers and sharing them with police and pressuring hosts into sharing information to help with their extrajudicial ROSKO investigations. Or the "Shadowserver Foundation," which ostensibly exists to stop botnets, yet also for some reason hosts the seizure page for Liberty Reserve.

> Additionally, a huge industry has been built around it, employing many people and generating massive amounts of wealth

That's an unfortunate but necessary cost, not something to be happy about. It's as much a positive argument as the broken window fallacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com