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> I feel safer knowing that there are people out there, hunting down these unsecured caches of data. There's very little difference between maliciously encrypt
by emidln 6y ago
> I feel safer knowing that there are people out there, hunting down these unsecured caches of data.
There's very little difference between maliciously encrypting someone's data once you have managed to establish code execution vs exfiltrating all of the data and then using any PII to open lines of credit.
For you as a consumer, the former doesn't harm you. The later has the ability to harm you quite a bit in ways that take months/years to sort out. Do you really feel safer because the criminals that cracked these systems flipped a coin that landed on the "extort our victim" side rather than the "free leads to customers of our victims" side?
- c22 6y agoYes, that's the point. These organizations holding my PII haven't historically given half a damn if all my data gets exfiltrated or not. By electing to pursue the other side of the coin these attackers provide incentive for those companies to batten down the hatches, causing my PII to become more protected as a side-effect, thus leading to a greater feeling of safety.
- gowld 6y agoOK but they aren't.
- zie 6y agoMore incentive to at least make sure their backups work.. but not enough incentive... yet, to actually increase security. So I don't disagree with your premise, I'm just not sure it's actually true in real life, where companies are not punished by anyone for being lazy.
- c22 6y agoI don't have any evidence either way so all I can do is appeal to common sense, but I can't imagine most of the organizations hit by ransomware didn't at least devote some extra amount of attention or resources towards IT security in response. At a bare minimum I'd expect them to at least patch the vulnerability that the ransomware used to infect their systems. Are there any examples of orgs that have been repeatedly hit by ransomware over and over? Working backups are not enough to insulate you from this threat. If you allow an attacker to remain within your systems long enough you might find they've encrypted all your backups!
- zie 6y agoagreed. I prefer your version of reality, I'm just not sure it's true.
- nkrisc 6y agoThere's three possible outcomes: 1. The victim organization that has my data gets everything encrypted and is forced to pay a ransom. 2. The same happens, but the hackers also release the stolen data, including my PII. 3. The hackers just sell the stolen PII from the start. As a consumer, I far prefer option 1. Maybe it will teach them to protect their system, and my PII, better. If my PII is released somehow, well that's what used to happen anyway. So it not happening is an improvement.