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They should make it illegal to pay ransoms.
by chrischen 8y ago
They should make it illegal to pay ransoms.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoThey'll find a way. Pay for consulting, pay from personal funds etc etc. Companies need to go back to work ASAP, ransom is a small cost of doing business.
- lozaning 8y agoI cant find the story anymore, but I seem to recall that at peak crypto locker there was a 'consulting company' that would fix this for you without you having to pay the attackers. Instead you paid the consultants double the extorted amount, and then they paid on your behalf.
- Scoundreller 8y agoSounds like the usual methods to get around public sector limitations on employee pay.
- michaelt 8y agoWouldn't the attackers inevitably blackmail you with the fact you illegally paid them?
- pjc50 8y agoIt doesn't say they're paying the ransom.
- lb1lf 8y ago-On the contrary, Norwegian newspapers stress that Hydro is restoring data from recent backups and to heck with the blackmailers.
- dev_dull 8y agoBetter yet, make hacking illegal!
- kwhitefoot 8y agoIt is already illegal in Italy. I would have thought that an imaginative prosecutor could find an existing law that could be applied to punish the payment of ransoms; even if it is only failing to pay some sort of tax or duty. Something like that is what is supposed to have brought down Al Capone.
- magduf 8y agoWere the affected systems running Windows? They should make it illegal to run critical systems on Windows.
- voidmain0001 8y agoAh the immunity of non-Microsoft operating systems: https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/osxshlayer-new-mac-malware-comes-out-of-its-shell/ https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/osxshlayer-new-mac-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/eset-discovers-21-new-linux-malware-families/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/eset-discovers-21-new-linux-ma...
- magduf 8y agoAny actual incidents of these things causing real outages for critical systems anywhere? (I'm going to guess it's a big NO on the first one, because no one uses Macs for critical systems.)
- bdamm 8y agoAside from being outdated advice, this is also globally impossible. Microsoft Windows has got a major lock on the industrial control systems industry. Almost anything being produced today has a Windows machine in the workflow doing something critically important, from monitoring fluid flows to running microchip programmers and test stations.
- magduf 8y agoThen people shouldn't be too surprised when stuff like this happens, and they should just pay the ransom: it's what they accepted by using Windows. "That's the way it's always been" isn't a valid excuse for continuing to make something unsafe.
- bdamm 8y agoThe advice is outdated because it is entirely possible for Windows machines to be secured well enough for this work. Windows security, like Linux security, is not a binary state with either a zero for no security or a one for security. They did not accept crippling ransomware by using Windows. Nobody does. This attitude is fatalistic and somewhat juvenile. They may have implicitly accepted crippling ransomware by not having sufficient internal security processes.
- lozaning 8y agoRight now the FBI's advice for companies that get critical systems crypto locked is to just pay the ransom. https://securityledger.com/2015/10/fbis-advice-on-cryptolocker-just-pay-the-ransom/ https://securityledger.com/2015/10/fbis-advice-on-cryptolock...
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoThat was in 2015, at the time ransomware was somewhat "behaved" and there weren't the many different variants that did things like just scrambling your files and throwing up a Bitcoin address to "decrypt" them. I think things have shifted now to the where it's not something that's recommended.
- lsllc 8y agoMy local Police Department got their dept. computers crypto locked via some ransomware or other, the FBI told them to pay the 1 bitcoin or whatever they were asking, which they did and got it unlocked!
- Scoundreller 8y agoIt is in Canada if you’re kidnapped. But officials will also privately inform you that nobody has ever been charged.